While enjoying a pint of beer at his local pub in the English city of Manchester, "web designer and enthusiast amateur cook" Ben Holden decided to order some bar snacks on the side. Then a lightning bolt of culinary inspiration struck:
Holden ate a little pickled egg together with a slice of warm, moist savoury scotch egg. Then he started dipping pieces of pickled egg into finely crushed crisps, revelling in the texture contrast of the crunch and the rich, yielding firmness of the egg white. Convinced that, "that pickled flavour dimension is that extra level that the scotch egg has always missed", he went home that night determined to fuse the two: "If I have an idea like that, I'm more than happy to dive in and experiment."
After some tinkering and refinement, he came up with what he now calls the Manchester Egg. Suffices to say it's made out of things that only the English--and then, perhaps only Mancunians--would consider eating in combination with one another, for the most part. But that is appropriate: Holden's mission for the Manchester Egg is to provide the city of Manchester with a new indigenous dish.
"It's about time Manchester had a new namesake food stuff, that it can really call its own. No-one has tried it since, probably, the Eccles cake. I just though, 'why not? Let the people have an egg'. And I've thought about the legacy. If I can establish a new type of basic Manchester foodstuff, this might live longer than me."
