My egg salad with avocado, shrimp and chives, served on warm toast. Photo: Anton Biletskyi-Volokh, personal archive.
I love egg salad. And one of the things I find fascinating about it is that almost every country seems to have its own version.
I've eaten plenty of egg salad sandwiches in America, rather different ones in Japan, and equally delicious ones in France. Somehow, they're all good. I've yet to encounter a bad egg salad.
In Ukraine, we eat it straight from the bowl, or use something very similar as a filling for pirozhki, little savoury pastries stuffed with chopped boiled eggs and green onions. Some Ukrainian versions of the salad also include finely chopped radishes. The French, meanwhile, have a fondness for adding chives.
The simplest egg salad is almost embarrassingly simple: hard-boiled eggs, chopped finely, mayonnaise, perhaps a little seasoning. Done.
Naturally, I couldn't leave it alone.
My version, pictured here, starts with finely chopped hard-boiled eggs and a little chives. Then I add avocado, which gets along remarkably well with eggs and has the useful side effect of reducing the amount of dressing needed.
And then comes my favourite addition: shrimp.
I use the small, cooked, peeled shrimp sold in supermarkets, the sort Scandinavians pile onto their open sandwiches. I chop them a little further before mixing everything together.
For dressing, I generally prefer olive oil or plain yogurt rather than mayonnaise. Occasionally, I'll combine yogurt with a little mayo. Add salt, freshly ground black and white pepper, and that's really all there is to it.
Now take a slice of genuinely good bread, toast it until golden brown, and pile the salad onto it while the toast is still warm.
That's my idea of a perfect breakfast.
Although, frankly, I can't think of a time of day when I'd turn one down.