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Yolks of Eggs
Eggs should always be wiped with a damp cloth before they are broken. The shells are then all ready to be used for clearing coffee, soup, or jelly. When any uncooked whites or yolks are left over put them in a cup, cover with a folded damp cloth, and slip a rubber band around it. Leftover poached or soft-cooked eggs may be carefully returned to hot water and cooked until hard, and then chopped and mixed with cold meat or fish dishes (see Kedjeree, page 89, and Fish with Pie Crust, page 94), or sliced and used for salads, (see Green Pea Salad in Egg Cases, page 121), etc.
Bits of omelet or scrambled eggs are always permissible in a meat hash. "Floating Island" for Soft Custard (Using up Whites of Eggs) Beat up whites of eggs until stiff, gradually beat in very little powdered sugar, and drop large spoonfuls in hot (not boiling) milk in frying-pan.
Dip milk over egg, that it may cook slightly.
Take up in a skimmer and drain. Serve on sofi custard with a bit of bright jelly on top of each spoonful.
Snow Pudding (to Use up Whites of Eggs) Mix four tablespoonfuls of sugar with four tablespoonfuls of corn-starch and one-eighth teaspoonful of salt. Add a pint of boiling water and boil five minutes, stirring constantly. Put in double boiler and let cook half an hour. Cool and flavor as desired. Fold in the stiffly beaten whites of two or three eggs and a cup of any fresh or canned fruit, without juice, and mold it. Serve with sweetened cream.
Blanc Mange (to Use up Whites of Eggs) 1 pint milk (scalded) 5 tablespoonfuls corn- Whites of 3 eggs 1 pint milk (scalded) 1 tablespoonful sugar starch Grated lemon-rind teaspoonful salt Blend corn-starch with one-fourth cup cold milk, add to scalded milk, and cook in double boiler, then directly over fire a few minutes. Add other ingredients. Beat in stiffly beaten whites of eggs after corn-starch is taken from fire.
Serve with sugar and cream.
White Cake (to Use up Whites of Eggs) Mold. cup butter 2 cups bread flour 1 cup sugar cup milk 4 teaspoonfuls bakingpowder Few grains of salt Whites of 3 eggs 1/2 teaspoonful almond extract Cream butter and sugar, add flour (with bakingpowder and salt), and milk alternately. Flavor-
A cluster of thrift notes on egg storage followed by four ways to spend a surplus of whites. The techniques are sound; the quantities in the later recipes are where care is needed.
- Storing raw whites and yolksA damp cloth and rubber band was the pre-plastic answer to a skin forming on yolks. Use an airtight container instead: whites keep four or five days refrigerated and freeze well, yolks two days at most and are best covered with a spoonful of cold water.
- Egg shells for clearingCrushed shells and whites were once whisked into coffee, consommé or jelly so the coagulating albumen would trap sediment and lift it as a raft. Modern filtration makes this unnecessary, and raw shell is no longer considered a clean addition to anything unless it has been washed and dried thoroughly.
- Re-cooking soft eggsReturning a poached or soft-boiled egg to hot water to firm it works, but the yolk turns crumbly and greenish at the edge. Give it four or five minutes in water just under a simmer rather than a hard boil.
- Floating island: heat is the hingeThe milk must sit around 175-180F. At a boil the meringues inflate, then collapse into rags. Two minutes a side, turning once, is enough; drain on a cloth, not paper, which sticks.
- Meringues and raw eggThe spoonfuls are barely set through and the soft custard beneath is cooked only to nappe stage. Anyone cooking for the very young, elderly or immune-compromised should use pasteurized whites and take the custard to 170F.
- Snow pudding proportionsFour tablespoons of cornstarch to a pint of water gives a firm mold that will unmold cleanly. Five minutes of hard boiling plus half an hour in the double boiler is more than needed for gelatinization -- fifteen minutes over water is ample and avoids a pasty flavor.
- Blanc mange quantitiesThe milk quantity is printed twice and the salt figure has lost its fraction; read the milk as one pint in total, and the salt as some fraction of a teaspoonful that cannot now be recovered from the text. Five tablespoons of cornstarch to a pint is a stiff, sliceable mold in the old style, not a pourable pudding.
- White cakeButter and milk quantities are unclear as printed, and the mixing directions break off before the whites are folded in and the pan and oven are named. The book gives no oven heat, time or tin for this cake, so any figure has to be supplied by the cook. The whites, already stiffly beaten, go in last and are folded, not beaten.
- YieldThe snow pudding and blanc mange each serve four to six; the floating island quantity depends entirely on how many whites you have to spend.
Books of this kind proliferated in English and American kitchens from the 1890s through the First World War, when domestic economy was taught as a civic virtue and a cook who wasted an egg white was thought to be wasting money that belonged to the household. The four dishes here all answer the same structural problem: mayonnaise, custards, sponge cakes and noodles consume yolks and leave whites behind, so the frugal cook needed a standing repertoire to absorb them. Floating island -- the English name commonly given to what French cooks call oeufs a la neige, snow eggs -- appears in European cookery writing well before 1800, though earlier versions often floated the meringue on wine or cream rather than custard. Blanc mange had by this date drifted a long way from its medieval namesake, a white dish of pounded almonds and capon; by 1900 the word meant little more than a cornstarch mold, and the arrival of cheap boxed cornstarch in the middle decades of the nineteenth century is what made puddings like these an everyday resort rather than a confectioner's trick.