Look, you can reject Received Wisdom and do your own thing in the interests of rigor, or you can cook the way your grandmother did. We all know which produces better food.

Of course stoves are different. But trying to normalize things as an a priori goal (in this case by dropping cold eggs into boiling water!) only makes things worse. Traditional recipes are traditional precisely because they're tolerant of situational slop and occasional misinterpretation.

Hypothetical grandmother cooks well because she perfected the technique over a few decades.

That's great and all, but recipes are communication, and if they can't communicate _how_ to achieve grandmother results to a new person, then what in the hell is the point?

It'd be better off if the recipe just said "figure it out" then, instead of trying to imply certainty where none can exist due to stove differences.

> Of course stoves are different. But trying to normalize things as an a priori goal (in this case by dropping cold eggs into boiling water!) only makes things worse. Traditional recipes are traditional precisely because they're tolerant of situational slop and occasional misinterpretation.

Except this supposed recipe isn't tolerant of anything. Eggs are still over or under done based on a minute here or there, and which way is a guessing game without the context of which exact stove.

If that were the best possible, then fine, but there's other recipes that are actually repeatable in this comment page, so what's the benefit of the grandmother recipe again?