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Cooking of True Proteids Continued: Eggs: Beaten
Slightly Beaten Eggs. For slightly beaten eggs the yolks and whites are not separated. Eggs are slightly beaten, when a full spoonful can be taken up. Well Beaten Yolks. Yolks are "well beaten," when they are light, thick and lemon-colored.
Whites Beaten Dry. Whites are beaten dry, when the mass does not slip from the dish turned upside down.
Utensils for Beating Eggs. A fork, whisk, perforated spoon, or Dover egg beater are the utensils commonly used in beating eggs. When whites of eggs are beaten dry, the mass will be larger, if it be beaten with one of the first three utensils, but it will take a longer time to do the work than with the Dover egg beater.
COOKING EGGS In our first lesson we noted that albumin was toughened by a high degree of heat. If you set a saucepan of cold water over the fire, put in a thermometer, and then break an egg into the water, you can note how the consistency of the egg changes as the water heats. As a study in the cooking of eggs, it might be worth while to cook several eggs, on different occasions, transferring them from the water, with a skimmer, to a slice of toast, when the thermometer registers 134 deg, 160 deg, 180 deg and 212 deg respectively. As far as solubility has a bearing on the subject, a raw egg is more digestible than one that has been cooked; but for other reasons, people in general prefer to have the albumin in eggs slightly coagulated by heat.
EGGS COOKED IN SHELL, SOFT, MEDIUM, ETC. (1) Take a granite ware saucepan, holding rather more than one quart. In it heat one quart of water to the boiling point, remove the saucepan from the fire, and lower an egg into it, cover closely and let it stand six minutes, for soft-cooked, and eight minutes, for medium-cooked eggs. With two eggs let stand eight minutes, for soft-cooked, ten minutes, for medium-cooked, and half an hour, if the eggs are to be used in salads, for a garnish, etc. (2) Take two saucepans, the same as above. Heat the water in each to the boiling point, remove from the fire, and lower into one an egg from a refrigerator, and into the other an egg from the warm room; cook as before, six minutes, then compare the consistency of the two eggs. Why this difference? (3) In a similar manner, we could learn that, in order to have uniform results, the conditions must not vary; i.e., the kind of saucepan, number of eggs in a saucepan, the quantity of water, as well as the temperature of the eggs, must be the same each time.
This is a lesson page as much as a recipe, and its method for eggs in the shell — off the heat, covered, in a fixed volume of water — still produces better results than a rolling boil. A few of its terms and one of its experiments need comment.
- The hinge: never let the water boil with the egg in itWater is brought to a boil, taken off the heat, and the egg lowered in to coast. Egg white toughens and turns rubbery above roughly 180F, so the falling temperature of a covered quart of water is doing deliberate work here. Keep the lid on and do not return the pan to the burner.
- Granite wareEnamelled sheet iron or steel, a common cheap pan of the period. It matters because the book is making a point about consistency: pan material, wall thickness and water volume all change the cooling curve. Any heavy pan will do, but use the same one each time if you want repeatable eggs.
- Egg temperature is part of the recipeExperiment (2) exists because a refrigerated egg and a room-temperature egg cooked for the same six minutes come out differently. If you start from the refrigerator, expect to need slightly longer than the stated times.
- Times as writtenOne egg: 6 minutes soft, 8 minutes medium. Two eggs: 8 minutes soft, 10 medium, 30 minutes for hard-cooked eggs destined for salads or garnish. Scale the water up if you add more eggs, or the temperature drops too far too fast.
- Dover egg beaterA hand-cranked rotary beater, patented in the 1870s and the workhorse of American kitchens until electric mixers. A modern balloon whisk corresponds to the "whisk" option: slower, but as the text says, it builds greater volume in beaten whites.
- "Beaten dry"What the book calls dry is what recipes now call stiff peaks — the mass holds when the bowl is inverted. Beating past that point breaks the foam and it begins to weep, so stop at the inversion test rather than pushing further.
- The 134F experimentEgg lifted out at 134F and set on toast is effectively raw, and raw shell eggs carry a real risk of Salmonella that this book had no way of knowing about. The 180F and 212F samples in the same exercise are fine; skip the two low ones, or use pasteurised eggs if you want to run the comparison.
- "A raw egg is more digestible"This reflects a period belief that solubility equalled digestibility. Current understanding runs the other way: cooking denatures the proteins and raises protein availability, and raw white contains avidin, which binds biotin.
Cooking for Two belongs to the domestic-science movement that ran through American cooking schools from the 1880s onward, and this page shows its method plainly: a thermometer in the pan, one variable changed at a time, and a question — "Why this difference?" — put to the reader rather than answered. Albumin coagulation was one of the era's favourite teaching subjects because it made an abstract chemical idea visible in a bowl, and the Boston Cooking School — founded in 1879 by the Woman's Education Association, with Fannie Farmer as principal from 1891 until she left to found her own school — and its imitators built whole lessons around it. The off-heat, covered-pan technique for eggs in the shell rests on the same argument, that boiling eggs hard was simply bad chemistry; a century later it is standard advice. The Dover beater named here was the domestic-science kitchen's emblem of efficiency, and the author's careful note that a whisk gives greater volume but takes longer is exactly the kind of measured trade-off these books liked to record.