When I was a child my dad would confuse me by asking “do you say the yolk of an egg is white or are white?” But it is their yin-yang, rich-light; oily-dry duality that makes eggs such a versatile food. While the sun shines in the yolk it is the whites that bring light to many a dish, including omlets, meringues and snows. Best known to all Australians must be the iconic pavlova which has long been the topic of Antipodean debate about who ‘invented’ the pavlova as we know it, but we’re wise enough to steer clear of such competitive controversy and celebrate some other light white wonders this week!

Not all sweetness and light

It isn’t all sweetness and light – egg white had other practical applications in the kitchen. Lightly whipped egg white was painted onto ceramic bottles and jars to seal their porosity. Egg whites were also used for clarifying liquids, an art still used today to refine consomme and some wines. It was also used to clarify the meat-based stocks used to make jelly or gelatin (which you can see in this Eat your history calf’s feet jelly video). Mrs Beeton explains the science behind the art with her particular didactic nineteenth-century style flourish:

1387. THE WHITE OF EGGS is perhaps the best substance that can be employed in clarifying jelly, as well as some other fluids, for the reason that when albumen (and the white of eggs is nearly pure albumen) is put into a liquid that is muddy, from substances suspended in it, on boiling the liquid, the albumen coagulates in a flocculent manner, and, entangling with it the impurities, rises with them to the surface as a scum, or sinks to the bottom, according to their weight.

Techno-free technique

Whipping egg whites is quite an art too, even these days. The secret is to make sure all your equipment is absolutely squeaky clean, as any slight trace of oil will prevent the egg forming stiff peaks, essential for lightness and volume in meringues, mousses, souffles or delicate sponge cakes. We now have the benefit of electric beaters or high powered ‘chef’s’ or ‘kitchen aids’ to whip eggs, but it wasn’t always that way. Cooks would use bundles of sticks as whisks or even their fingers, with recipes saying to beat eggs for up to an hour! Aunt Kate (Jessie Catherine Thorburn 1857 – 1945) at Meroogal employed a now-old fashioned but ‘tried and true’ method of whipping egg whites for the family’s signature Meroogal sponge cake, which you can see being made in this video, whipping the required six egg whites on a large flat dinner plate using a table knife. Kate would whip the whites for precisely twenty minutes to achieve the correct volume. We challenge you to do this stamina test for your next sponge!

Lost favourites

We’ve talked about various ‘snows’ in this blog  – with recipes for sago snow and apple snow. Another sweet treat that appears on nineteenth-century menus, often as an after dinner extra, is a ‘sweet omlet’ easily prepared and served in a jiffy. It appears to have been a family favourite in the Meroogal household, with this recipe recorded in one of their manuscript cookery books in 1908. It comes with a final note which inspired today’s blogpost title: ‘Never prepare an omlet till you are quite ready to serve it. The lighter they are the quicker they fall‘. It’s quite a useful recipe for a household where eggs are always in supply, which would have been the case in many homes, large and small, that kept their own chooks. They can be served plain, dusted with icing sugar or topped with jam or syrup. Ease up on the sugar if you’re going to serve them with a sweet topping. It’s what my mother would have called a ‘poor man’s’ souffle.

Snowy peaks

Egg whites are key of course to meringues and macaroons (macarons these days), but they really came into their own in the domestic baking repertoire with the arrival of ‘modern’ technologies including gas ovens with controllable temperatures, and – wait for it! – the rotary beater! (Yentsch, 2012). Combined, these culinary revelations allowed housewives to create large scale meringue cakes (pavlova) and meringue-topped pies – the lemon meringue pie probably the only true survivor in Australia. Meringue ‘pies’ were also a practical way to make use of the whole egg, the yolks used in rich fillings and the whites adding contrasting colour and texture.

 Whimsical treats

Antonine Careme, chef to Prince Regent at the Brighton Pavilion created Meringue des pommies en harrison, a whimsical dessert requiring forty apples blanketed in whipped sweetened egg white and decorated in the form a hedgehog (harrison). It was much copied in cookbooks and is still fun to make today, especially if you want a children’s treat, albeit in a much simplified and more manageable version. 

References and further reading: Anne Yentsch. ‘Lessons from archaeology and anthropology for New England cookbooks: pies and puddings’. 2012.