July 4 is Independence Day. Fireworks flash on the night sky, and across the nation’s sidewalks are eggs… for some reason.
Aside from being Independence Day, today is also the “National Fry An Egg on the Sidewalk Day”, an event which coincided with the country’s celebration of independence. It is a day when people, as the name suggests, fry eggs on sidewalks.
One of the earliest references to frying an egg on the sidewalk contained in the Library of Congress dates back to an 1899 issue of the Atlanta Constitution. In a column titled “How to Keep Cool,” Dr. Francis Henry Wade advises his readers: “With the thermometer cavorting away up among the nineties, with the bricks of the sidewalks hot enough to fry eggs, with ‘heat prostrations’ and sun strokes ‘filling bodies with anguish and bosoms with fear,’ as the poet puts it, the question 'How to keep cool?' becomes an all-absorbing one of the hour in the mind of every one, no matter what his vocation or walk of life.”
In other words, this tradition has been around for over a century!
But the question is: can you really fry an egg on the sidewalk?
Find out on Smithsonian.com.
(Image Credit: Clker-Free-Vector-Images/ Pixabay)