>> Now find us a URL for a supplier of "long egg" machines...
> "Long egg"? "Long pigs" I've heard of but "long egg"?

There is a British food called Grosvenor Pie, which is a pork
pie with a hard-boiled egg in the middle. For catering uses,
they make extra-long ones (more than a foot long) designed
to be sliced. In the middle of each slice of pie there is a
slice of hard-boiled egg, with the yolk concentric with the
white, with every slice having the same cross-section. "Long
egg" is what makes this possible - firms that make Grosvenor
pies can buy or make tubular hard-boiled eggs. I presume they
are made by some simultaneous extrusion/cooking process but
I've no idea what it is. (One possibility that comes to mind
is enclosing the yolk in an extra-long biodegradable condom
before hard-boiling the whole thing).

I have sometimes wondered if this product was the inspiration
for the eternal chicken in Pohl and Kornbluth's dystopia "The
Space Merchants".

I have once heard that the British egg industry briefly produced
cubical eggs in the Fifties to save on packaging. Since they
could only come hard-boiled they had limited usefulness.

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