by Bee Wilson
Then again, laborious preparation was not limited to egg whites. Most recipes involving beaten whites also included sugar, or double-refined sugar to be precise, another arm-sapping thing to produce. It is easy to forget what a revolution it was when sugar began to be sold pre-ground in the late nineteenth century; when British customers could choose among caster, granulated, and icing sugar without having to do any of the work themselves. Pre-ground sugar is a far more labor-saving invention than sliced bread. Traditionally, sugar came in a lump or loaf, conical blocks ranging in size from five to forty pounds. It was “nipped” into smaller pieces using sugar nippers. In order to convert it into something to be used in cooking, it needed to be pounded—once more in the trusty mortar—and refined through a series of ever-finer sieves. Colanders and sieves are another of those implements, like the mortar and pestle, that have not really altered in essentials since ancient times, the reason being that ancient cooks relied on them far more than we do.
As late as 1874, the Paris-based chef Jules Gouffé described what was involved in processing sugar. This was how he made granulated sugar (used for sprinkling on sweet pastries):
Procure three sifters or colanders, one with holes ⅜ inch in diameter, another with holes ¼ inch in diameter, a third with holes ⅛ inch, and a hair sieve.
Chop the sugar into pieces with a knife, and break up each piece with the end of a rolling pin, being careful not to grind any of the sugar to powder as this would take away the brightness of the remainder.
The sugar then has to be sifted successively through each of the sifters, concluding with the hair sieve.
Gouffeécomplains that some do not take the trouble of going through this whole rigmarole, “owing to its being rather . . . troublesome.” Instead, they merely pounded the sugar in a mortar without any of the sieving. Gouffé regretted such laziness, noting that mortar sugar lacked the brightness of sugar sifted “the old-fashioned way.” He is by implication regretting the existence of kitchens less well-equipped with labor than the royal ones in which he worked. Surprisingly little had changed in the nearly 500 years since Le Ménagier de Paris; or in the 2,000 years since Apicius, come to that. Sifting and grinding, beating and straining; these were still activities in which people were employed to weary themselves, in order that rich people might enjoy fluffy creams, powdery sugar, and other rich compounds.
The technological conservatism of food processing cannot be understood apart from the servant question. We often ignore the great and disquieting fact that premodern cookery books were largely written for people who did not themselves do any of the hands-on cooking, for people who would take the credit for what was served at their table without having put in any of the elbow grease. Well-born ladies might dress a salad with their own fair hands, or perform some of the prettier tasks, like sugar work, but they did not need to do any of the heavy beating and grinding tasks, because they had people to do that for them. Robot Coupe is a twentieth-century French brand of food processing machines: choppers, grinders, kneaders, and sievers. The name implies that these are kitchen robots, like an artificially powered servant. But for as long as there were plenty of real servants on hand—or a hard-working wife in poorer households—there was no call for robots.
Things only really started to change after the Industrial Revolution, when altered patterns of labor combined with factories that could mass-produce low-cost metal gadgets finally led to an outpouring of new machines designed to make the cook’s life easier.
The phrase “labor saving” is first recorded in relation to manufac-Tturing in 1791. It would be another half a century before the concept arrived in the kitchen. In the second half of the nineteenth century in the United States, the market was suddenly flooded with “labor-saving” culinary devices, many cheaply made of tin. There were raisin seeders, potato mashers, coffee mills, cherry pitters, and apple corers. Many were heavy apparatus clamped to the table like meat-grinding machines, which also appeared in volume. And all of a sudden, there were hundreds and hundreds of competing varieties of eggbeaters. What tulips were to Holland in the 1630s and Internet startups were to Seattle in the 1990s, eggbeaters were to the East Coast of the United States in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. Between 1856 and 1920, no fewer than 692 separate patents were granted for eggbeaters. In 1856, one eggbeater patent was issued; in 1857, two; in 1858, three. In 1866, the number had jumped to eighteen, with designs ranging from jar shakers to tin shakers, from ratchets to the Archimedes (a kind of up-and-down mixer based on the Archimedes screw used in shipbuilding).
Marion Harland, a cookery writer who lived through the eggbeater bubble, recalled how unsatisfactory many of the novel beaters turned out to be. She found that very few of the patent eggbeaters outlived the initial excitement. Wooden handles fell off; tin handles stained your hands black. Elaborate machines consisting of “whirligigs” inside a tin cylinder seemed marvelous until you found that the tin cylinder was impossible to wash and too big to whip small quantities. “After a few trials,” Harland added, “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.”
One of the first patent eggbeaters to outlast the initial novelty stage was the Williams eggbeater, patented on May 31, 1870, and better known as the Dover. The Dover is an American icon: the basic form that the cheapest hand-operated eggbeater will still take in any hardware store. The idea behind it is simple: two whisks are better than one. The earliest 1870 Dover beaters consisted of two bulbous beaters with a rotary wheel to turn them. Turner Williams of Providence, Rhode Island, the inventor who first thought it up, described the advantages of his invention as being the “very peculiar shearing action” that came from two wheels revolving in opposite directions at once in the same space, something not seen in any previous beater.
The Dover was an instant hit, so much so that “Dover” became the generic term for eggbeater in America. “Look for ‘DOVER’ on the handle,” ordered an ad of 1891, indicating its huge popularity; “NONE OTHERS ARE GENUINE.” An 1883 book of Practical Housekeeping praised the Dover as “the best in the market.” The writer Marion Harland was another fan. Writing in 1875, five years after it came on the market, she insisted that “egg whipping ceased to be a bugbear to me” from the day she bought a Dover, adding that she would not sell it for $100 (note: a portable eggbeater at this time would have cost no more than 10–25 cents). What was so great about the Dover?
Light, portable, rapid, easy and comparatively noiseless, my pet implement works like a benevolent brownie. With it I turn out a meringue in five minutes without staying my song or talk.
Harland, whose real name was Mrs. Mary Virginia Terhune, offers some insights into the circumstances, both social and culinary, that created America’s eggbeater boom. Born in 1830, she was brought up in rural Virginia, the third of nine children. Her own mother did little or no cooking. “I doubt if she ever swept a room, or roasted a piece of meat, in her life,” Harland later wrote. As was traditional for Southern ladies, she had “black mammies” to froth her eggs for her (and do much else besides).
Harland herself took a more active role in the kitchen than her mother. As well as producing twenty-five novels, she believed it was her calling to master the role of “homemaker.” After she married a Presbyterian minister in 1856 and moved to New Jersey, Marion decided to teach herself and her cook greater skills in the kitchen. In 1873, she published the results of their many cooking sessions in Common Sense in the Household, which sold 100,000 copies.
Harland is not writing for women who have to beat all their own eggs. She assumes her readers will have a cook, but one who needs considerable guidance and help to produce eggs as fluffy as is desirable. Harland’s ecstasy over the Dover eggbeater belongs to an uneasy transition point in the history of servants. The middle-class American women she is writing for still have cooks, but probably only one. If the cook’s arms become weary then their arms
will be next. Harland writes—in terms so condescending they make us cringe today—about the conversation she has with her servant, Katey, on bringing home an expensive fixed eggbeater, a “time-and-muscle saver in a box.” Harland brings the “cumbrous” eggbeater into the kitchen, “trembling” with excitement. “Yes, mem, what might it be, mem?” asks Katey. The complicated contraption goes wrong; it ends up tipping a bowl of ten yolks onto the floor. The hapless Katey is forced to experiment with a number of other devices before Harland discovers the miracle Dover beater.
Why did fluffy eggs matter so much, anyway? The great eggbeater boom coincided with a period of American cuisine when sweet things at respectable tables had become intensely aerated. For dessert, there might be apple snow or orange snow or lemon snow, each requiring the whites of four eggs, whipped to a “standing froth.” There was Orleans Cake (six eggs beaten light and the yolks strained) and Mont Blanc Cake (the whites of six eggs, very stiff). There were creams and charlottes, syllabubs and trifles, whipped frostings, muffins and waffles, not to mention meringues. All of these dishes depended on highly aerated eggs: yolks beaten to a cream, whites to a fluff. On the successful rise of these delicacies, a housewife’s reputation might depend. A properly airy cake—produced with a Dover or one of the other newfangled whisks—spoke well of a household. Even though it is mostly her cook who actually does most of the whipping, Harland takes the credit for the light muffins emanating from her kitchen. She contrasts her muffins with those of a less vigilant friend who wasn’t aware that her cook, Chloe, had been lazily making muffins with eggs barely beaten at all with “half a dozen strokes of the wooden spoon.” Harland rebukes her friend for not having been more “alert.”
The eggbeater boom answered a desire in middle-class American women not just to get more out air into their eggs, but to get more labor out of their servants. To those who were without servants altogether, the eggbeaters were supposed to make them not regret the lack; to feel that their arms were doing no work even when they actually were. In 1901, a Holt-Lyon eggbeater along Dover lines promoted itself with the claim that owing to its unique “flared dashers” that “instantly tear the eggs into the minutest particles,” it could beat “eggs lighter and stiffer than the best hand whips in one-fourth the time.”
Yet despite the euphoric claims of the advertisers, none of these mechanical eggbeaters was really very labor-saving. The great drawback of the rotary beater is that it requires two hands to operate, leaving you no way of holding the mixing bowl. The paddles have a tendency to jam stubbornly in a particular place as they rotate, or else to whirr around too fast. They slip around in the bowl, spattering eggs everywhere long before they have stiffened. The Dover claimed it could beat the whites of two eggs in ten seconds: nonsense. A rotary beater usually takes longer to get whites stiff than a balloon whisk, in my experience; in either case, it is a matter of minutes, not seconds.
Many subsequent eggbeater designs tried to address the inadequacies of the Dover, only to create new glitches. Various eggbeaters dealt with the problem of a sliding mixing bowl by setting the paddles into an attached jar or bowl; but this created its own annoyances, in that you could only beat a small amount at a time and the bowl attachment was another thing to wash. Other beaters addressed the problem of needing two hands to hold the beater. “A New Idea in Egg Beaters” boasted a 1902 ad for a Roberts eggbeater, a type of Archimedes whisk. This was “the only automatic beater made that works with one hand. . . . Simply press on the handle and release.” This was undoubtedly an advantage; but the one-handed beaters—whose mechanisms ranged from strange wire whirls to springs to disks like potato ricers—were far from perfect. They took a very long time to froth eggs or cream, and they could malfunction if a hasty housewife attempted to speed things up. “Do not operate too fast” warned the Simplex one-handed mixer, unhelpfully. Strangest of all was a family of water-operated egg whisks hooked up to the new running water that was appearing in American homes. “Turn the Faucet and it Starts!” boasted The World Beater.
Looking back on this curious moment in American history—the eggbeater bubble—we are faced with a conundrum. From a purely technological point of view, not a single one of the hundreds of patented designs on which so much intelligence was lavished and so many dollars spent was actually an improvement in efficiency or ergonomics over the basic French balloon whisks, which had been in use at least since the eighteenth century, long before the eggbeater boom started (and possibly as long ago as 1570 in Italy, as mentioned above). No top chef now would dream of using a Dover eggbeater. But many of them still have a wide range of old-style balloon whisks (or “French whips”), sometimes using them in tandem with old-fashioned copper bowls. The top quality balloon whisks now come with insulated handles, and the wires are made of stainless steel instead of tin. Other than this, however, these are exactly the same whisks that would have been used by an eighteenth-century confectioner.
So what was going on with the American eggbeater boom? The whole thing was a phantom. This wasn’t really about saving labor, because the French whip took less arm action to do the job than most of the new patented designs. It was more about the illusion of saving labor and time. Rather than offering a real cure for weariness, they were placebos. Those who bought them—like Marion Harland—needed to feel that someone, if only the manufacturer, was on their side in the perennial battle to produce the fluffiest eggs in the least amount of time. What the eggbeater boom tells us is that suddenly, cooks had started to rebel against their tired arms. But those arms would only really get a rest with the advent of the electric mixer.
If Carl Sontheimer had not been so taken with quenelles, the history of American home cooking over the past forty years might have been very different. In 1971, Sontheimer was a fifty-seven-year-old engineer and inventor (whose discoveries included a lunar direction finder used by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration [NASA]), a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a French food buff. Having successfully started and sold two electronics companies, Sontheimer was enjoying early retirement. As much a hobby as a business, he traveled to France with his wife, Shirley, looking for French culinary products that might translate in an American market. It was at a French cookery show that he spotted it: a food processor designed for restaurant use, called the Robot Coupe. It wasn’t pretty or compact, but it was amazingly versatile. As well as being able to blend—like the electric blenders that had been on sale in America since the 1920s—it could grind, chop, dice, slice, and grate. It could take almost any food and reduce it to puree. Carl Sontheimer looked at this bulky machine and what he saw was quenelles.
“A quenelle,” writes Julia Child, “for those who are not familiar with this delicate triumph of French cooking, is pâte à choux, cream, and puree of raw fish, veal, or chicken that is formed into ovals or cylinders and poached in a seasoned liquid.” Prepared in the traditional manner, they are a pain to make. Souffles are child’s play by comparison. The quenelle mixture—the paste of chicken or nsh—required long pounding and sieving to ensure it was satin smooth. Even Julia Child in 1961, that “servantless cook,” needed to go to the trouble of putting her fish quenelle paste through the grinder twice. And this was all before you got to the perilous task of molding the fragile mixture into oval shapes using two dessert spoons. Julia Child noted, with typical kindness, that “in case of disaster,” if the quenelles collapsed you could “declare it to be a mousse.”
Carl Sontheimer spotted that the wondrous machine in front of him could take this fraught process and hugely simplify it. All of the pounding and sieving could be done at the touch of a button. The Robot Coupe had been created in 1963 by Pierre Verdun, a French inventor who aimed his device at the restaurant business. It was a hefty drum with a rotating blade inside. It had three functions: start, stop, and pulse. Sontheimer saw that a scaled-down version could work every bit as well in home kitchens. As soon as he had spotted the machine, he negotiated distributio
n rights to sell his own adapted version of the Robot Coupe in the United States. He brought a dozen machines home for his own personal experiments in the kitchen. In his garage, he fiddled with the various versions, taking more than a year to analyze every component until he created a model that made the smoothest quenelles with the greatest of ease. What to call this new wonder gadget? “He always thought of French cooking as an art and he wanted it to be based on the word cuisine,,” recalled his wife, Shirley. Hence, Cuisinart.
When the Cuisinart launched in the United States in 1973, it was expensive. The initial retail price was $160. In today’s money, that is nearly $800 (based on the Consumer Price Index; by contrast, in January 2011 you could buy a brand new Cuisinart for $100). At this price, it might have been expected that the Cuisinart would never be anything other than a niche piece of equipment, and sure enough, for the first few months, sales were sluggish. All it took, however, was a couple of favorable reviews—one in Gourmet magazine, one in the New York Times, and suddenly the Cuisinart was flying off the shelves. Craig Claiborne, the food critic for the New York Times, was an early adopter of this “most dextrous and versatile of food gadgets.” As an invention, he compared it to “the printing press, cotton gin, steamboat, paper clips, Kleenex,” the equivalent of “an electric blender, electric mixer, meat grinder, food sieve, potato ricer and chef’s knife rolled into one.” It was, he excitedly claimed, the greatest food invention since toothpicks.