In no department of nice cookery are the effects of lax or hasty manipulation more sadly and frequently apparent than in such dishes as are dependent for excellence upon the lightness and smoothness of beaten eggs. Unless yolks are whipped to a thick cream, and whites to a froth that will stand alone, the texture of cake will be coarse, and if the loaf be not heavy or streaked, there will be a crude flavor about it that will betray the fault at once to the initiated. The same is emphatically true with regard to muffins, waffles, and griddle-cakes. Mr. Greeley said, and aptly, of two publishers of note: “One will make a louder rattle with a hundred dollars than the other can with a thousand.” I have often recalled the remark in contrasting the tender, puffy products of one housewife’s skill with the dense, clammy cakes and crumpets of another, who used double the quantity of eggs and butter, and cream instead of milk.

“I think,” observed a friend, at whose house I was visiting, “there must be a mistake about the muffin receipt you gave me the other day. It calls for three eggs. My cook insists that five are none too many, yet hers, when made, do not look or taste like those I ate at your table.”

In reply I craved permission to see the batter mixed by the critical cook. Entering the kitchen in company with the mistress, we found Chloe in the act of breaking the five eggs directly into the flour, milk, etc., already mixed in a large bowl. Half a dozen strokes of the wooden spoon she held would have completed the manufacture of the raw material. Eggs are inveterate tell-tales, and they had given no uncertain warning in this case, had the mistress been on the alert.

Some eggs cannot be frothed. The colored “mammys” used to tell me that they were “bewitched,” when, with every sweep of the wisp they were depressed and dwindled before my wondering eyes. I have learned since that, whether this non-inflative state be the result of undue warmth of the dish into which the eggs are broken, or staleness of the ovates themselves, it is a hopeless task to attempt rehabilitation. Their demoralization is complete and fatal. The wise housewife will give up her cake or dessert for that day, unless she is willing to throw the obdurate eggs away, cleanse the bowl, wiping it perfectly dry, and let it cool before attacking another batch.

Nor will whites froth to stiffness if a single drop of the yolk has found its way into them. Regardless, as a leader of the cod-fish aristocracy, of the claims of early associations upon memory and respect, they sullenly assert the impossibility of rising in the world if they are to be clogged by that which lay so close to them before the shells were broken. All the beating of the patent egg-whip in impatient fingers will not suffice to make them see reason. The fact that there is ten-fold more nourishment and sweetness in one yolk than in a pint of their snowy nothingness; that it is, in truth, the life, without which an egg would be a nullity, has no more effect in changing their exclusive notions than have volumes of argument proving the solidity and vitality of the middle classes upon the gaseous brains of the bon ton. Humor their folly—for whites are useful, because ornamental, if rightly handled—by carefully taking out the offensive plebeian speck.

Our mothers whipped up yolks with a spoon, and the whites with a broad-bladed knife, or clean switches, peeled and dried. Miss Leslie’s “Complete Cookery” will tell you all about it. (And, by the way, if you doubt that fashions change in cookery as in all else, I commend to your perusal this ancient manual.) Then came a rush of patent egg-beaters, and a rush of purchasers as well, whose aching wrists and shoulders pleaded for relief from long hours of incessant “beating,” “whipping,” and “frothing.” There were wire spoons with wooden handles that broke off, and tin handles that turned the perspiring hand black; wire whirligigs that ran up and down upon a central shaft and spattered the eggs over the face and bust of the operator; cylindrical tin vessels with whirligigs fastened in the centre, almost as good fun for the children as a monkey on a stick, but which bound the housewife to place and circumstance, since her eggs, many or few, yolks and whites, must all be churned in that vessel—not an easy one to keep clean, on account of the fixture within it. There was altogether too much machinery for the end to be accomplished, and the white of a single egg was so hard to find in the bottom of a quart pail! After a few trials, 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. Then, our enterprising “general furnishing” merchant overwhelmed us with a double compound back (and forward) action machine that was “warranted to whip up a stiff mÉringue in a minute and a half.”

“I will not quite endorse that, ladies,” said the most important tradesman in a community of housekeepers and housekept. “But I will stake my reputation upon its doing this in two minutes.”

We all bought the prize. It looked cumbrous, and it was expensive, but time is money, and we remembered that a large snow-custard must be beaten ninety minutes with an ordinary egg-whip, and cake-frosting, thirty. We paid, each of us, our dollar and a half, and carried home the time-and-muscle-saver in a box of its own, so big that we chose back streets in preference to fashionable promenades, on our return. Trembling with exultation, we rushed into the kitchen to display the treasure.

“Yes, mem! What might it be, mem?”

“Why, Katey! an egg-beater! and the greatest convenience ever manufactured!”

“Ah! and what a silly was meself, mem, to be thinking it was a coffee-mill, when I saw you a-screwin’ it on to the table!”

We screwed it “on to the table,” at a corner, for there was not room for it to revolve at sides and ends. Katey held a bowl with eggs in it at just the right elevation below; and by turning a crank we moved a many-cogged wheel which fitted into another wheel, which turned a whirligig at the bottom. Katey held the bowl steadily; we worked very fast at the windlass-handle, and in eight minutes the mÉringue was ready.

“Well done!” cried housewives, one and all. “Great is the Grand duplex back (and forward) action Invention, for the amelioration of weary-wristed womankind! To be sure, it takes two people to work it, unless one can hold the bowl firmly between the knees in just the right place, but it is undeniably a wonderful improvement.”

I, with the rest, cried, “wonderful!” even when the bowl tipped over on the kitchen-floor, with the yolks of ten eggs in it; when I broke the screw by giving it one turn too many, and was blandly assured by the artificer in metals, to whom I took it for repairs, that “them cast-iron articles can’t never be mended, ma’am, without it is by buying of a new one;” even when the cogs of the wheels became rheumatic, and hitched groaningly at every round. But when one day, in full flight through a seething heap of icing, the steel strips of the triple whirligig that did the whipping, suddenly caught, the one upon the other, and came to a dead lock; when, as I would have released them by an energetic revolution of the wheel, they tore one another out by the roots,—I arose in deadly calm; undid the screw, set the bowl on the table, straightened my cramped spine, and sent to the nearest tin-shop for a shilling whisk.

Four years ago, without prevision that one of the blessings of my life was coming upon me, I paid a visit to my “house-furnisher.” He had a new egg-beater for sale.

“Vanitas vanitatum!” said I, theatrically waving it from me, “I am cured!”

“It comes well recommended,” remarked he, quietly.

“But, as you say, so many of these things are humbugs! Will you oblige me by accepting this, giving it a fair trial, and letting me know just what it is? I will send it up with the rest of your articles.”

For three weeks—I blush to write it—THE DOVER hung untouched in my kitchen-closet, and I did daily penance for my sin of omission with the shilling whisk. At last I broke the latter, and with a slighting observation to the effect that “it might be better than none,” I took down my gift.

I beg you to believe that I am not in league with the patentee of my favorite. I do not know whether “Dover” stands for his name, that of the manufacturing company, or the place in which it was made. “Dover Egg-beater, Patented 1870,” is stamped upon the circumference of the iron wheel. I know nothing more of its antecedents. But if I could not get another I would not sell mine for fifty dollars—nor a hundred. Egg-whipping ceased to be a bugbear to me from the day of which I speak. Light, portable, rapid, easy, and comparatively noiseless, my pet implement works like a benevolent brownie. With it I turn out a mÉringue in five minutes without staying my song or talk; make the formidable “snow-custard” in less than half an hour, with no after tremulousness of nerve or tendon. In its operation it is impartial, yolks thickening smoothly under it as easily as whites heighten into a compact snow-drift, that can be cut into blocks with a knife. Winter and summer, it has served me with invariable fidelity, and it is to all appearance, stanch as when it first passed into my reluctant hands. I hope the gentlemanly and benevolent donor will sell one thousand per annum for the remainder of his natural existence, and if length of days be a boon to be coveted, that the unknown patentee will live as many years as he has saved hours of labor to American housewives and cooks.