WHAT I KNOW ABOUT EGG-BEATERS.
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In no department of nice cookery are the effects of lax or hasty manipulation more sadly and frequently apparent than in such dishes as are dependent for excellence upon the lightness and smoothness of beaten eggs. Unless yolks are whipped to a thick cream, and whites to a froth that will stand alone, the texture of cake will be coarse, and if the loaf be not heavy or streaked, there will be a crude flavor about it that will betray the fault at once to the initiated. The same is emphatically true with regard to muffins, waffles, and griddle-cakes. Mr. Greeley said, and aptly, of two publishers of note: “One will make a louder rattle with a hundred dollars than the other can with a thousand.” I have often recalled the remark in contrasting the tender, puffy products of one housewife’s skill with the dense, clammy cakes and crumpets of another, who used double the quantity of eggs and butter, and cream instead of milk.
“I think,” observed a friend, at whose house I was visiting, “there must be a mistake about the muffin receipt you gave me the other day. It calls for three eggs. My cook insists that five are none too many, yet hers, when made, do not look or taste like those I ate at your table.”
In reply I craved permission to see the batter mixed by the critical cook. Entering the kitchen in company with the mistress, we found Chloe in the act of breaking the five eggs directly into the flour, milk, etc., already mixed in a large bowl. Half a dozen strokes of the wooden spoon she held would have completed the manufacture of the raw material. Eggs are inveterate tell-tales, and they had given no uncertain warning in this case, had the mistress been on the alert.
Some eggs cannot be frothed. The colored “mammys” used to tell me that they were “bewitched,” when, with every sweep of the wisp they were depressed and dwindled before my wondering eyes. I have learned since that, whether this non-inflative state be the result of undue warmth of the dish into which the eggs are broken, or staleness of the ovates themselves, it is a hopeless task to attempt rehabilitation. Their demoralization is complete and fatal. The wise housewife will give up her cake or dessert for that day, unless she is willing to throw the obdurate eggs away, cleanse the bowl, wiping it perfectly dry, and let it cool before attacking another batch.
Nor will whites froth to stiffness if a single drop of the yolk has found its way into them. Regardless, as a leader of the cod-fish aristocracy, of the claims of early associations upon memory and respect, they sullenly assert the impossibility of rising in the world if they are to be clogged by that which lay so close to them before the shells were broken. All the beating of the patent egg-whip in impatient fingers will not suffice to make them see reason. The fact that there is ten-fold more nourishment and sweetness in one yolk than in a pint of their snowy nothingness; that it is, in truth, the life, without which an egg would be a nullity, has no more effect in changing their exclusive notions than have volumes of argument proving the solidity and vitality of the middle classes upon the gaseous brains of the bon ton. Humor their folly—for whites are useful, because ornamental, if rightly handled—by carefully taking out the offensive plebeian speck.
Our mothers whipped up yolks with a spoon, and the whites with a broad-bladed knife, or clean switches, peeled and dried. Miss Leslie’s “Complete Cookery” will tell you all about it. (And, by the way, if you doubt that fashions change in cookery as in all else, I commend to your perusal this ancient manual.) Then came a rush of patent egg-beaters, and a rush of purchasers as well, whose aching wrists and shoulders pleaded for relief from long hours of incessant “beating,” “whipping,” and “frothing.” There were wire spoons with wooden handles that broke off, and tin handles that turned the perspiring hand black; wire whirligigs that ran up and down upon a central shaft and spattered the eggs over the face and bust of the operator; cylindrical tin vessels with whirligigs fastened in the centre, almost as good fun for the children as a monkey on a stick, but which bound the housewife to place and circumstance, since her eggs, many or few, yolks and whites, must all be churned in that vessel—not an easy one to keep clean, on account of the fixture within it. There was altogether too much machinery for the end to be accomplished, and the white of a single egg was so hard to find in the bottom of a quart pail! After a few trials, the cook tossed the “bothering thing” into a dark corner of the closet, and improvised a better beater out of two silver forks, held dexterously together. Then, our enterprising “general furnishing” merchant overwhelmed us with a double compound back (and forward) action machine that was “warranted to whip up a stiff méringue in a minute and a half.”
“I will not quite endorse that, ladies,” said the most important tradesman in a community of housekeepers and housekept. “But I will stake my reputation upon its doing this in two minutes.”