Sage and Chili Butter on Fried Eggs (and everything else!)

Spice up your fried eggs with this delicious caramelized sage and chili butter! Not only is this butter great on eggs, but also on pasta, roasted veggies, and an array of other great meals.

Much like the sage chili butter in its kitchen, Towpath has a way of enhancing everything it touches. From planting gardens to gathering volunteers to clean up litter, Towpath is a bright spot on the Regent’s Canal.

The following recipe and essay are excerpts from Towpath by Lori De Mori and Laura Jackson. They have been adapted for the web.

Prefer to listen? Then you’re in luck! This recipe is featured on episode 1 of the Towpath podcast. Listen while you cook. 

(Photograph by Scott MacSween and Joe Woodhouse)

---

Serves 4

Ingredients

For the Sage and Chili Butter: 

bunch of sage
150g / 5 1/2 oz butter, cut into pieces
1/2 lemon, juiced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2–1 teaspoon chilli flakes
salt and pepper

(Note: The sage butter will make more than you need. It is delicious tossed through pasta, on top of gnudi, roast veg or a veggie stew. If left in the fridge overnight, gently warm it up when you want to use it. The sage will lose its crispiness as it sits, but will still taste delicious up to 2 days later.)

For the Fried Eggs:

sunflower, olive or a neutral oil, for frying
8 fresh eggs
4 slices sourdough bread, toasted

Procedure

For the Sage and Chili Butter: 

1. Pick the sage, saving the stalks for the stock
2. Place the butter and sage in a medium-sized frying pan
3. Melt butter over medium-low heat and cook until sage leaves start crisping. Turn heat to low to prevent burning if needed
4. Once crisp, turn the heat off and add lemon juice to prevent further cooking
5. Add garlic and chili flakes, stirring well and seasoning to taste
6. Pour into a container and keep in a warm place until it’s needed

For the Fried Eggs: 

1. Warm a different frying pan over high heat
2. Pour in oil until it’s generously coating the bottom
3. When the pan starts smoking, crack in your eggs. Be careful not to overcrowd, or they won’t crisp!
4. Cook eggs until the edges go crispy – about a couple of minutes
5. Turn down heat to finish cooking the eggs – another couple of minutes. Use the oil in the pan to baste the egg whites if they are still raw.
6. Serve with buttered, toasted sourdough bread and the sage and chili butter over top

---

Canal Life

I was in India a couple of winters ago with friends and, while four of us were haring around the Mysore market like unruly children, my partner Rob leaned up against a stall selling temple paraphernalia and quietly watched it all go by. ‘It’s like the Great Barrier Reef,’ he said. ‘Why swim around trying to see everything? I just drop to the bottom and stay until I need to come up for air.’

Our perch at Towpath feels something like that – a fixed point in a kaleidoscope of water, sun, (duckweed!), rain, wind, ice, (snow!), coots, swans, geese, (terrapins!), pike, (eels!), narrowboats, kayaks, (coal barges!), walkers, runners, (police divers!), cyclists, dogs, (foxes!).

On most days, though, there’s a curiously bucolic air to our particular bit of the canal, surprising for something both man made and situated three minutes from a dizzying stretch of the Kingsland Road. I’ve spent many an hour looking out at it from behind the bar, pondering what particular combination of elements gives this little patch of water and land its vague sense of countryside.

There is the way the canal curves just as it meets the bridge, whose Georgian brickwork arches low and wide over the water. On one side is a stand of fluttering silver birches. On the other, an elder (from whose blossoms we make elderflower cordial) and a grand old sycamore with gnarled, sprawling limbs. In midsummer, the late setting sun streams golden light through the underside of the bridge.

I am not waxing lyrical – it is a beautiful sight.

On summer nights, the place can feel like a bayou. The city dissolves into darkness, the water an inky black, broken only by the slow passing of a boat or the skittering of waterbirds. We have yet to tire of the moment when we turn off the last light and see the liquid, wavy reflection of water appear on our tiled walls, like stars in the night.

We have our share of urban Huckleberry Finns. Boys trailing fishing rods with all the time in the world to cast their lines, sit patiently and wait. One of them, a shy, lanky teenager named Henry, brought us photos of his prize catch – a glittering pike as long as his outstretched arms.

Finally, there is the water itself, reflecting back London’s moody skies, sparkling in sunshine, pattered with rain, rippled by wind, hosting its parade of birds and boats. . . and sometimes alas, the rubbish, which seems to gather and travel across the water like some distant cousin of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. We are, after all, in what was once the grittiest part of the largest city in Europe. Which means that some days the canal feels like Varanasi on the Ganges, with its funeral pyres, ablutions, clothes washing and prayer offerings all happening at once. A collision of the sacred and the profane. Open your eyes to any of it and you get, as Zorba the Greek called it, ‘the full catastrophe’. This is a good thing, though not always an easy one. Unless you’re totally blinkered, it is hard to ignore.

We could argue until the cows come home about whose responsibility it is to make things better.

The council can’t keep up with the rubbish, which piles up every weekend beside the one lonely bin next to the bridge. The Canal & River Trust has the task of caring for miles of an increasingly busy waterway as an underfunded charity. The infrastructure is insufficient to the tasks required of it. It’s a familiar tune. Maybe the whole world is going to pot and we really are doomed. And so? Meanwhile, rubbish begets rubbish.

Luckily the opposite is true.

There are two little green spaces on either side of our bridge. When we first opened Towpath, the far one was occupied by two large dead trees and the near one by overgrown shrubs and decades of accumulated debris. With the help of our friend Kevin, master tree surgeon and accordion player, we dug up the trees and replaced them with a ramshackle raised garden. This year, thanks to Rob’s green thumb, there are sunflowers, cistus, orange cosmos and hollyhocks. The shrubs made way for bike hoops, a raised woodchip bed we call ‘the beach’ and a wall of climbing roses, wisteria, hops and clematis. Neither garden is ever as tended as we’d like it to be. And there is still litter, though not nearly as much.

The canal seems to attract the sort of people who not only go out of their way to follow its watery path through the neighbourhood, but are willing to roll up their sleeves and help take care of it. This year the Wildlife Gardeners of Haggerston raised money for floating reed beds and planted them with rushes and sedges, which will act as a natural water filter and purifier, and provide a living habitat for fish, birds and butterflies. To our great good fortune, they’ve anchored one of their floating sanctuaries right across from the Towpath.

Cleaning up the neighbourhood is not an event, it’s an approach. Which with any luck becomes a habit. Like brushing your teeth. It’s good for you and it feels better than ignoring the whole mess. And we’ve noticed something – help is all around. All you have to do is ask.

We carry out our little beautification projects in the low-tech manner with which we do most things. Whoever has the best handwriting will chalk up a plea for volunteer gardeners on a blackboard and lean it up on the table with the water jugs and glasses. And they come, bless them, even in rain, even if they know nothing about gardening and even if there’s nothing to do but weed, water and pick up rubbish. The past couple of years we’ve collaborated with the Canal & River Trust on canal clean-ups. We supply the men, women and children. They turn up with kayaks, canoes, litter-pickers, grappling hooks and the services of one of their long, flat barges to collect our haul. It is by necessity a wholly collaborative effort. One person paddles or steers while the others try to grab whatever’s been spotted in the water. It’s hilarious good fun that happens to do a bit of good. And there are few sights as lovely as that of a bunch of seven year olds in high-vis lifejackets marching up and down the canal brandishing litter pickers or sitting in a rowboat scanning the water for treasures. Then wanting to know when they can come back and do it again.

---

Recommended Reads

Break Up Boring Dinners with Lamb and Hummus!

Making Amazing Amazake Rye Bread