More than 15 years after my father’s death, I have finally discovered the secret to his scrambled eggs.

Now, most instructions for flavorful scrambled eggs say to add milk or cream to the eggs. I’ve done that for years, and it does add flavor and a certain “softness” to the eggs, but they were not the amazingly wondrous scrambled eggs of my youth. In fact, I don’t ever remember either of my parents adding milk to scrambled eggs. Maybe they did, but I think I would have noticed that.

Today, I let the cast iron pan heat up and in my haste plopped in about 3x the amount of butter I would normally use to cook eggs. Seriously, I put in about 1/3 of a stick of butter to cook three eggs; but the pan was hot and it was pretty much pointless to try to scoop the butter out, so I shrugged and dumped in the eggs to cook.

Well, I’ll be damned, but THAT is the secret. My father must have used whole sticks of butter to cook dinner (we often had eggs for dinner); I do remember him cooking with butter but I guess the quantity never registered. Seriously, Poppa obviously loved butter.

My eggs were perfect, exactly how I remembered them from my childhood, the scrambled egg ambrosia that died with my father’s major stroke in 1994.

Grief is made up of these leftovers, as I call them. Leftovers of life: how did Poppa cook eggs? What was the secret to Mother’s amazing bran muffins? Why did she save that one silver pin she never wore? Why did Poppa have a bag of about 20 Air Force Lt. Colonel insignia in his drawer – too many to just be his? We don’t know we even have these questions to ask until it is too late to ask them.

Sometimes, like with Poppa’s scrambled eggs, we stumble over the answer. More often, we live with the leftovers, remembering and wondering and chasing.

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