It’s one of those dishes that you don’t really talk about because it’s so basic: fried eggs, white rice and something for seasoning. Many cultures have some variation of egg rice. It’s perfect for that weird in-between pause after work and before dinner. Finding this bottle was a huge comfort to her, a taste of home, and her mother’s Vietnamese cooking. “The store didn’t even have a name - it just said ‘Asian Mart,’” Dang says.

Eggs and rice were already grocery staples for her, so all she had to do was locate the Maggi, that slim-necked dream of a bottle with an iconic red cap, which she found at a small store in the city. “It’s one of the first things I learned to make on my own,” she says. But when she left her home in Orange County, Calif., for grad school in Baltimore, she started to miss it. It was just something her mother whipped up for her and her baby sister on busy mornings. Growing up, Dang never thought much of this snack. And it’s filling but not too filling, perfect for that weird in-between pause after work and before dinner, when you’re so hungry you can’t imagine how you’ll even make it to dinner, let alone cook it. If you can fry an egg, then you can make egg rice. The great thing about egg rice is that it’s hardly cooking. “I eat this at least once a day,” she told me. She pierces her fork straight down into the food, so she has an even distribution of Maggi-tinged yolk, crisp-edged egg white and steamed white rice, fluffy as a fresh-raked pile of leaves, on her tines. She breaks the yolk and mixes the Maggi into it, creating a makeshift gravy that drapes the rice in eggy gold. For Dang, who is a pharmacist, there’s a ritual to eating this simple but potent dish, one she has upheld since she was young. Then, over the yolk, she pours a little Maggi sauce, a dark, savory potion of wheat protein.

She fries a single egg sunny-side up and places it on a small plate of leftover jasmine rice.

Most of these eggs go into a snack she makes for herself when she comes home from work: egg rice. Every two weeks, Christina Dang buys a carton of 18 eggs from the Costco near her home in San Diego.

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