my coworker just said “if you wanna make alfredo you gotta grate some cheese in it” in the way someone would say “to make an omelette you gotta break some eggs”
we need to start doing this with increasingly delicious and complex food. oh you think this gonna be a difficult task? well if you want to make a puff pastry you gotta combine some cold butter and flour in a food processor until the butter crumbs are small, then combine with cold water, then roll and fold and roll and fold and roll and fold and roll and fold and roll
Ooh! I wonder if choosing another type of food was the coworker’s way of avoiding the fraught history of the metaphor
(that’s an article on Slate from 2013 that could just as easily be a Tumblr “let’s stop using this phrase” callout post from any year if you added more insults and took out the marketing links)
(But the gist is, it’s pretty much always been used in the context of war to talk about acceptable casualties, which yeah is an unsavory thought. In any context it means you have to do something unpleasant, perhaps destructive, to get the result you want. But the connotations it has developed do skew pretty heavily toward those destructive things being various war crimes.)
(I disagree with the author’s conclusion that the proverb is nonsense in all contexts because breaking eggs is never a bad thing. I think he’s reading too much literalism into the metaphor. The breaking of an egg represents destruction because it is breaking something. And breaking an egg is bad, actually, if it’s not at the right time. Wastes the egg, if you don’t have an omelette or something to put it in.)
(Still, though, I think there’s something to the idea of using different metaphorical recipes! I like the idea that the “something unpleasant you have to do to get a result” might just be unpleasant because it’s hard work, or repetitive, or boring, or makes a mess of ingredients.)
(Which is a very common situation in everyday life! And the puff pastry example expresses it much better than the omelette.)