LIGHT N'FLUFFY
For something so light and fluffy, whipped cream and meringue sure take a lot of hard work!
Until the late 1800s, there was only one way to get that wonderful light texture: beating by hand. From long before anyone started writing cookbooks, people used branches of twigs, sometimes of aromatic wood for flavor. Surviving Shaker recipes suggest using peach twigs, bruised to release the scent.
Japanese tea masters started using bamboo whisks for their ceremonial matcha in the late 15th century, and still do.
Eventually, cooks realized that wires would work as well as twigs, and they’d last longer and be easier to clean. The balloon whisk was invented sometime in the early 1800s and was the kitchen standard by later in the century.
None of this was fast and easy, though.
Old cake recipes calmly advise cooks to beat the egg whites for an hour. It probably really did take that long, and there really was some unfortunate servant whose job it was to beat eggs for hours on end. My arms hurt just thinking about it.
Everything changed in the last quarter of the century, at least in the U.S. Rotary beaters were invented in the 1860s, but there were a bunch of different designs, and it took a while for the standard design we know now to become popular.
Once it did, though, things got a lot lighter and fluffier!
Angel-food cakes had been around before the rotary beater, at least for anyone who had the time to beat the egg whites, or a servant to do it for them, but once beaters were available, they really took off. Recipes for angel-food start showing up in prestige cookbooks around the turn of the century…along with all kinds of fanciful meringue preparations taking advantage of the new ease of beating whites.
Interesting note, here, though: rotary beaters didn’t catch on nearly as much or as quickly in Britain, and cookbook writers didn’t seem to see the need. Which kind of makes you wonder about who was writing the cookbooks – and who was doing the actual cooking!
While somebody got the idea to stick an electric motor on an eggbeater as early as the 1880s, powered mixers didn’t make it into the home kitchen for decades. Sunbeam and Kitchen-Aid models much like the ones many of us have today started appearing in the 1920s, and became more and more common after World War II, when more people could afford them.
And then, of course, there’s the blender.
While it has swirling blades, it actually evolved on a whole separate track: stemming from the machines used to mix milkshakes at soda fountains. And even though it’s a kitchen – and wedding gift – fixture, it’s not used much for whipping cream or eggs – even though some folks (my mom!) swear by blender hollandaise.
Let’s just leave food processors for another day, since they’re a much later innovation.
However you get there, one thing is certain: light and fluffy things involve an awful lot of heavy metal. Or lifting!
Got a #ThrowbackThursday idea? Drop it in the comments!
Until the late 1800s, there was only one way to get that wonderful light texture: beating by hand. From long before anyone started writing cookbooks, people used branches of twigs, sometimes of aromatic wood for flavor. Surviving Shaker recipes suggest using peach twigs, bruised to release the scent.
Japanese tea masters started using bamboo whisks for their ceremonial matcha in the late 15th century, and still do.
Eventually, cooks realized that wires would work as well as twigs, and they’d last longer and be easier to clean. The balloon whisk was invented sometime in the early 1800s and was the kitchen standard by later in the century.
None of this was fast and easy, though.
Old cake recipes calmly advise cooks to beat the egg whites for an hour. It probably really did take that long, and there really was some unfortunate servant whose job it was to beat eggs for hours on end. My arms hurt just thinking about it.
Everything changed in the last quarter of the century, at least in the U.S. Rotary beaters were invented in the 1860s, but there were a bunch of different designs, and it took a while for the standard design we know now to become popular.
Once it did, though, things got a lot lighter and fluffier!
Angel-food cakes had been around before the rotary beater, at least for anyone who had the time to beat the egg whites, or a servant to do it for them, but once beaters were available, they really took off. Recipes for angel-food start showing up in prestige cookbooks around the turn of the century…along with all kinds of fanciful meringue preparations taking advantage of the new ease of beating whites.
Interesting note, here, though: rotary beaters didn’t catch on nearly as much or as quickly in Britain, and cookbook writers didn’t seem to see the need. Which kind of makes you wonder about who was writing the cookbooks – and who was doing the actual cooking!
While somebody got the idea to stick an electric motor on an eggbeater as early as the 1880s, powered mixers didn’t make it into the home kitchen for decades. Sunbeam and Kitchen-Aid models much like the ones many of us have today started appearing in the 1920s, and became more and more common after World War II, when more people could afford them.
And then, of course, there’s the blender.
While it has swirling blades, it actually evolved on a whole separate track: stemming from the machines used to mix milkshakes at soda fountains. And even though it’s a kitchen – and wedding gift – fixture, it’s not used much for whipping cream or eggs – even though some folks (my mom!) swear by blender hollandaise.
Let’s just leave food processors for another day, since they’re a much later innovation.
However you get there, one thing is certain: light and fluffy things involve an awful lot of heavy metal. Or lifting!
Got a #ThrowbackThursday idea? Drop it in the comments!
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