But her favorite way to express their simplicity is to shirr them. It's an old-fashioned technique that essentially means baking an egg. In her version, the eggs in ramekins are simmered in seasoned cream that reduces slightly into a soft sauce.

Like vnſhorne veluet, on that termleſſe ſkin Whoſe bare out-brag'd the web it ſeem'd to were.

Faithless electors were nothing new in Wallace County. When President [John Fitzgerald] Kennedy won the election of 1960, Democratic electors from Alabama and Mississippi—incensed over Kennedy's stance on civil rights—tried to sabotage democracy by voting for Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia—a former Klansman who wasn't even on the ballot. Had enough electors followed suit, the election of 1960 would have been thrown into the House [of Representatives], and [Richard] Nixon might have won.

When the country was blockaded during the second world war and the nation’s farmers were told to convert scrub and pasture to sown fields, arable land doubled. In peacetime, the patriotic drive for self-sufficiency continued