“By the seat of your pants.”

That famous expression seems to mean you did something without a plan and succeeded by sheer luck.

That’s kind of the way I (we) used to boil eggs to devil them, usually for parties, since you wouldn’t go to all that trouble if you were just fixing them for yourself.

I was asked, “How long do you boil your eggs?”

I didn’t have an answer.

I knew the “three-minute egg” referred to soft boiled, at least I think it did, but I never timed our eggs. I just cooked them until they were ready. That’s cooking by luck.

I think I tended to overboil my eggs before dissecting them, just to make sure they were done. Sometimes the outer shell would crack, as if to say, “enough already!”

I did observe someone once who boiled eggs with a timer, and then when peeling and cutting to remove the yolk for deviling, the yolk was still a little runny in the center and didn’t devil very well, made a kind of gooey mess and people at the party left them on the plate.

The perfectly boiled egg should have a yolk perfectly centered so the white is evenly thick on all sides and can hold the mashed and deviled yolk when it is returned to fill the waiting cavity.

The perfect yolk itself should be a perfect yellow globe, and when you cut the egg in half, the yolk will evenly divide, the fork can pluck it out into the bowl for mashing and the result will produce the mouthful marvel people will talk about for days.

That’s why, when boiling the eggs, I would turn them several times to be sure the yolk would stay centered and not sink to one side and the white would then be too thin on that side and sometimes not form a stable cavity for the filling.

Egg lore can become overly complicated.

That’s not being overly obsessive, that’s just doing what you do when you want to do things right.

As in all things in life, you do what it takes to do it right.

Some people said, “You boil the devil out of them.” But that’s confusing, because you devil the yolks and put them back in.

We just boiled our eggs until they were done. You could tell by the way they spun. If they spun fast, they were boiled cooked done and ready. For Easter, they were ready for coloring.

We weren’t like the mean people. They colored uncooked eggs and gave them to children and watched them make a mess when they cracked their little enclosures and sometimes cried and the mean people laughed.

Some people are just too mean and shouldn’t be tolerated.

We were never like that.

We even used to boil eggs and pack them for food on camping trips so we could eat well on the trail.

Sometimes you see half of a boiled egg in a salad, like chef’s or antipasto, or wherever they want the salad to be more than lettuce so they can charge more and your food is more substantial.

I think in the early days we tended to cook all our food through because of salmonella. Salmonella was going around and got into things like eggs and if you didn’t cook them enough you could get sick and die.

Then there are some people who pickle their eggs. They boil them real hard and peel them and put them in a jar with pickle juice. Usually it’s a big jar and usually they’re red and you can see them on the counter in the deli and you can buy them individually and they’ll reach in with tongs and pull one out as the egg of your choice and you can eat it right there if you want to.

It’s a cultural thing.

Of course I remember Jimmy, my Greek step-dad, telling us stories about his youth in Athens when the kids at Easter would play the cracking game. You’d hold your hard boiled colored Easter egg tightly in your hand, bearing down so the shell would feel your intensity and not break, and your rival would hold his egg, and you’d knock the eggs together at the end and the one that cracked was the loser and had to give up the loser egg to the winner.

The more savvy kids knew when they found a novice who didn’t realize that you should knock the same ends together, because the rounder bottom tended to be slightly hollow with air in it, and the more pointy end was stronger sharper and would crack the big bottom. Some virtuoso winners collected a lot of eggs, which made them triumphant heroes bringing home food for the family.

There was that one kid who won every cracking contest and got all the eggs. The other kids suspected fowl play. They knew it wasn’t just skill or luck. They demanded an investigation, and discovered he had taken his mother’s darning egg, a wooden egg she used to put into a sock when she sewed up the holes. He had colored it to look like all the other eggs.

When they discovered his treacherous subterfuge, they chased him out of town.

But they also reluctantly admired his initiative.

Greeks prize intelligence wherever they find it.

Some people let their hard boiled eggs cool down slowly in the water, which ought to finish the cooking in case there was any doubt. Other people, certain the eggs were cooked hard, would drain the pot and fill it with cold water to cool down quicker, if you were in a hurry.

Either way worked if you did it right.

I never learned the secret of post-cooling so the shell, when cracked, would slide right off. Usually you had to hit it all over and peel it off bit by bit, which too often left pits in the outer surface.

Fortunately, when they were deviled and filled, they were arranged face up, bottom down, so you didn’t see the pits as you picked them up and popped them into your mouth.