Hmmm - I guess I'm still puzzled by the image of this lady sucking eggs. OK, she enjoyed the taste of raw egg, but why did she want to preserve the shells?
When I was a boy we used to collect birds' eggs. There were rules to this, for example you only took cold eggs and never disturbed the parent birds as they might desert the nest. When we found a cold egg that we needed for our collection we "blew" the egg. This was achieved by piercing a small hole each end of the egg and blowing through the egg to remove the contents (albumen? - cross threading here) leaving the shell intact. This could only be done successfully if the egg was sterile, reinforcing the need to collect cold eggs only. Is this still done today? I don't know; parents are much more protective of young children today so the opportunities may not be there.
dxb
