Very timely post! Those Llando egg cups are fabulous!!!

People in the US just don't seem to like soft boiled eggs. I love them! You can dip your toast in the yolk without making a total mess. Miss my Peter Rabbit cup...

My favorite "snack" as a kid was a soft boiled egg with butter and salt. My mom made the best! Thanks for the reminder (I actually bought egg cups at Crate & Barrel 4 years ago). I know what I'm having for dinner tonight!

I agree; they don't seem to be to people's liking in the U.S. I grew up eating boiled eggs (and Swedish egg cups) but probably because my mother's European.

One of my favorite tales about my great grandmother is her fancy sterling silver egg cups. Totally decadent and entirely impractical (the sulfur in the yolks insta-tarnishes silver). Apparently she kept her servants very busy polishing those suckers. :)

I love soft-boiled eggs. I can't stand hard yolks. A freshly boiled egg with salt and pepper is so delicious!

I love softboiled eggs too!

Finding the cups for them was difficult. I finally settled for some plain white ceramic ones that look like flowers-not my favorite. I found them at the crate and barrel outlet in Alexandria. The design isn't my favorite, I'd prefer something as sleek as an egg...but they'll do for now.

thanks to a vigorous, sensational-disaster-loving media, people in america are terrified of not cooking eggs well enough, you should see my mom smacking away the hands of her grandchildren when they try to sneak a raw cookie from the counter. This is why eggs are cooked to an unappealing solid in the US.

I love soft boiled eggs, salmonella be damned! But I confess that can't be bothered with egg cups - cute as they are. I boil two eggs and scoop them from their shells into a small bowl. I like to chop them up and season with salt & pepper. Yum!

Funny, I just had a conversation this weekend about how many people in the US don't even seem to know what an egg holder is. My dad grew up on these (his mom was a descendent of Irish Catholics--don't know if that had anything to do with it), and so I did, too. They seem totally normal to me, and I love some soldiers and eggs for breakfast.

I love me some soft-boiled egg, but eating them from an egg cup just seems so tedious. I like my eggs with toast anyway, and use it to catch any yolky drips.

The cups (cubes) in the last photo look too tempting--they are egg catapults!!

BTW-Love soft boiled eggs with cold cuts, cheese and toast--mmmm, a very european breakfast!

i disagree, Americans too love our soft-boiled eggs. Some friends and I were just discussing it as the "at home with a cold" comfort breakfast from otherwise cereal-and-go moms.

but like others have mentioned we just scoop them on top of checker-cut toasts. You'll might call it the patented American laziness I suppose?

while we are on the eggs topic, what's/are the best natural way(s) to color Easter eggs?

My grandmother, in the manner of many Southerners, had lots of china and glassware - lots of odd little things. She had a nice selection of egg cups. My mom had plain white china ones when I was growing up.

Another one here with European parents - we always used egg cups while growing up too... love them! @Sissy, they're not meant to be eaten from, just to hold your egg at the table while you prepare to eat. I think in the modern day we tend to just kind of boil the egg, and throw it on the toast. But BACK in the day, all seven of us around the breakfast table had a soft boiled egg in an egg cup and as mom toasted the bread and put it on the table, we went ahead and made our eggs-on-toast.

YUM! Would love to dig up those retro egg cups from the 70s!

I think it might be fear of salmonella as well that's lead to soft boiled egg decline. My grandmother would make them for me all the time. My mother...not so much. Come to think of it my grandmother never made them when she was around. Hmmm. Well I love the first egg cups. So colorful, but alas I would never use them. I'll be the first to admit that I'm pretty lazy and frankly rarely make eggs for myself because we almost never buy them unless they're an ingredient for something. Fiance won't eat them at all. In any form except as an ingredient in something else.

I love, love, love egg cups. I try not to collect tons of specialized gadgets, but egg cups are awesome and such a pretty form that I have to have some. My studio just created some ceramic egg cups with an architecturally inspired pattern that's reminiscent of Scandinavian design:

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=41015276

I too, grew up in a household with a European relative (my Icelandic great-grandma) who enjoyed boiled eggs and collecting eggcups.

The kitchen store up the street from me has some really neat eggcups that I kind of want to get. They're really sleek and remind me of great-grandma. It's just that I don't feel like I eat enough boiled eggs to justify owning any. Are there any other uses for eggcups than cupping eggs?

nato---Ohdeedoh just had this post about natural egg dying...

http://www.ohdeedoh.com/ohdeedoh/green-ideas/natural-egg-dying-112740

I don't know as it's really a salmonella thing, although I'm sure that hasn't helped, as much as a cultural thing. My family just has never done soft-boiled. I'd never heard of it until I became an adult. I remember wondering why in the heck everyone had a raw egg for breakfast in the book, Bread and Jam for Frances, and sympathized with her greatly. We always had scrambled (which I also hated!).

World Market has egg cups.

Does anyone know if a US retailer that has the Kathleen Hills egg cube? It'd cost me $60 US dollars to buy a single one from the UK and that's already excluding the VAT which we are not charged.