In England, rolling out a soft boiled egg with a line of toasted soldiers is about as nationalistic as it gets.

However, as a breakfast it’s also super tasty! About as mega as it gets, one could say. Tally, bally ho!

What’s Boiled Egg With Soldiers?

It’s where you soft boil an egg so the yolk is still runny.

You place the boiled egg in a diddy egg cup. Then you can crack the top off the egg with a tablespoon, revealing the gooey innards.

After this, you have toasted soldiers (as in, bread with margarine on them) to tip into the open skull of the egg.

It’s indulgent, but relatively healthy. Just stick with wholegrain bread, okay? None of this white bread rubbish!

What’s the History of Boiled Egg With Soldiers?

Boiled eggs are from all over the world and have been a pretty constant foodstuff for many countries for ages.

The soldiers aspect is more British specific. “Eggs with soldiers” began cropping up in the 1960s.

Prior to that, eggs were scare during WWII due to rationing (and, you know, bombs going off and all that).

But it became a popular dish in the ’60s thanks to a series of TV adverts starring popular comedian Tony Hancock and actress Patricia Hayes.

Our research into the history of this seems to point it’s this advert that turned boiled eggs with soldiers into a national dish.

Because the toast strips are so straight, they’ve got the name “soldiers” like they’re outside Buckingham Palace, or some such.

How Do You Make Boiled Eggs With Soldiers?

Here’s lunatic, sweary man bloke Gordon Ramsay to take you through his recipe for it. But, really, you just boil an egg for about four minutes. And toast some toast.

If helps if you have an egg cup handy for the boiled egg, too, otherwise it’ll roll all over your plate. Useless!

There are also various dilemmas to eating this dish. These are as follows:

• Boiling the egg for too long so the yolk isn’t runny.
• Undercooking the egg so you die of salmonella.
• The yolk spilling over the side of the egg and down the egg cup holder.
• Managing the ratio of soldiers to yolk requirements (one of the great tragedies of this recipe is running out of yolk and still have soldiers left).
• Managing the ratio of yolk to soldiers (a rarer occurrence, but just as devastating to get wrong).

So, it’s one of the more complex breakfasts to get right. But when you pull it off, it’s jolly sensational, old bean!