What is James Bond’s greatest weakness

James Bond is a man particular in his tastes. He doesn’t just have his drinks “shaken not stirred”, he also likes them to be served with a thin slice of lemon peel.

And, he is just as decided when it comes to the jams he eats. He likes only Tiptree strawberry jam or Cooper’s marmalade and his honey comes from the Queen’s grocers Fortnum and Mason.

But in no respect is he as particular as in the way he has his morning egg.

In From Russia With Love, author Ian Fleming, who died 50 years ago, describes Bond’s ideal breakfast. “The single egg, in the dark blue egg-cup with a gold ring round the top, was boiled for three-and-a-third minutes. It was a very fresh, speckled egg from French Marans hens owned by some friend of May [Bond’s housekeeper] in the country.

“Bond disliked white eggs and, faddish as he was in many small things, it amused him to maintain that there was such a thing as the perfect boiled egg.”

Enthusiastic readers of the Bond books and watchers of the films may feel they know the calculating spy, his choice of watch, the thrill he feels behind the wheel of a fast car, his weakness for a girl in black stockings, but how many know of the spy’s secret passion for the humble hen’s egg?

He eats them in every one of Fleming’s 12 Bond novels. He has them boiled, scrambled, fried, raw with a steak tartare and beaten into a “Prairie Oyster” hangover cure with Worcestershire sauce.

He orders them late at night when he has a treacherous blonde to seduce — and as a triumphant breakfast the following morning.

In a short story, 007 In New York, Bond even provides a recipe for scrambled eggs.

It is no accident that Bond has such an enthusiasm for eggs. Fleming himself was a great “ovophile” who ate scrambled eggs almost every day until his doctors advised against it. Eggs and coffee, he fondly said, were the “only things in life that never let you down”.

Even when he moved to Jamaica, where there was no shortage of exotic dishes to try, Fleming stuck to what he knew. In January 1948, Ann Rothermere, his future wife, flew out to join him at his villa Goldeneye. After a morning swim in the shallows they shared a “breakfast of paw paw, black mountain coffee and scrambled eggs”.

Almost the first thing Fleming did when he engaged the services of Violet Cummings, a local cook whose speciality was fried octopus tentacles, was to instruct her in how exactly he liked his eggs prepared.

And he didn’t just have them for breakfast. A new book, Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born by Matthew Parker, recounts a trip Rothermere and Fleming took to the south of the island with a picnic of iced limeade, marmalade sandwiches, fruit and hard-boiled eggs. The eggs were always fresh and the couple used to be able to hear the chickens clucking from their terrace.

It was at Goldeneye that Fleming sat down to write Casino Royale, the first of the Bond books. From the outset, his spy was a great one for eggs. In Chapter Four, not yet 20 pages into the book, Bond breakfasts above the harbour at Dieppe.

“He looked out at the beautiful day,” Fleming writes, “and consumed half-a-pint of iced orange juice, three scrambled eggs and a double portion of coffee without sugar.”

That Dieppe breakfast is only the start of it. Soon he is taking double agent Vesper Lynd, dressed in black velvet, out to a dinner of caviar, hot toast and grated hard-boiled eggs. Five chapters later, he is at it again, installing Vesper on a red satin banquette at a nightclub restaurant and ordering scrambled eggs. It doesn’t have quite the seductive effect Bond has been hoping, as she is promptly kidnapped. Before Bond has had time to digest his scramblies, he is behind the wheel of a supercharged Bentley and roaring after her.

Indeed, eggs are just the thing to fortify a man on a Secret Service mission.

In Diamonds Are Forever he wolfs down a plate of scrambled eggs, hot buttered rye toast and an iced coffee on his way to the notorious Saratoga racecourse, while in Moonraker he has scrambled eggs while he investigates the truth about the eponymous rocket.

And in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, he eats Eggs Gloria (chopped hard-boiled eggs with a cream and cheese sauce and English mustard) undercover in Switzerland.

Eggs are ideal, too, for restoring depleted energies after spending the night with a beautiful woman. Having shared a train compartment with Russian operative Tatiana Romanova through the mountains of Slovenia, in From Russia With Love, he breakfasts with her on fried eggs and coffee.

On one rare, uncharacteristic occasion in Dr No, Bond uses eggs as an excuse not to sleep with the divine Honey Ryder, played onscreen so memorably by Ursula Andress in a white bikini. When Ryder tries to lure him into a bath, Bond shouts: “Damn you! This isn’t the time for making love. I’m going to have breakfast.”

Having polished off a plate of hot scrambled eggs on toast and a grilled kidney, Bond discovers that the breakfast has been drugged. He would have been better off in the bath with Ryder.

Some readers may reasonably question why Bond’s favourite food is so humble. Shouldn’t an international intelligence operative prefer something a little more sybaritic, such as oysters or fillet steak? It seems astonishing to modern tastes, but in 1953 when Casino Royale was published, eggs were a luxury. Only a few months earlier, they had finally come off the ration after more than a decade.

Since 1940, adults had been rationed to just one egg a week. Private diaries at the time attest to how longed for and lusted after eggs became.

Vere Hogdson, an air-raid warden in Notting Hill, West London, for example, wrote in her diary on November 7, 1940: “Very difficult to get any eggs ... almost impossible.” A year later, in October 1941, things are just as bad. “No eggs again this week ... 3rd in succession, rotten!”

By May 1944, she is prepared to do anything to get her hands on them. “Have had four eggs given me from a Nameless Source. Sh! Sh!” she confides in her notebook.

The temptation of the black market was so strong that even the most respectable housewives were pulled in not just as consumers — but as profiteers, too.

Virginia Potter, married to an English Guards Officer, living in suburban comfort in Windsor, Berkshire, and keeping her own birds, was in March 1942 producing 32 hen’s eggs, nine goose eggs and a duck egg every week.

She sold them to her neighbours and prided herself on not charging as a proper “Queen of the Black Market” would.

To a reading public who for years had been urged by the Ministry of Food to bake their cakes with mashed potato or the detested powdered eggs instead of the real thing, Bond’s lavish breakfasts of scrambled eggs or dinners of oeufs en cocotte must have seemed the height of gastronomic indulgence.

So essential are eggs to the character of 007 that when Birdsong author Sebastian Faulks was asked to write a new Bond book in 2008 — Devil May Care— he has the spy on a mission in Tehran ordering scrambled eggs and coffee.

Later, when he finds himself imprisoned with MI6 agent Scarlett Papava (she, like earlier Bond Girls, is also a great wearer of black stockings) they fantasise about the meal they will have if they ever escape: roast partridge, caviar, sole meuniere and ... Eggs Benedict.

Of course, when they do find themselves at liberty and installed in a suite at a Paris hotel, breakfast is the last thing on their minds. Slipping off her stockings, Scarlett asks: “Shall we skip the Eggs Benedict?” And indeed they do.

So the next time you sit down to a plate of scrambled eggs, do not feel that yours is the boring, safe choice.

For they are just the thing when there are moon rockets to be stopped, henchmen to be chased and lissom women to be seduced.