Reader Lily writes:
READ ONJoe, the other day I left some egg yolks that I was about to whip into pastry cream sitting in a bowl with some sugar for too long. The yolk sides that were touching the sugar turned pale and hard. My instructor said that it was caused by sugar cooking the eggs because sugar and yolks together create heat. I’m skeptical, but what do you think?
It’s turned out that neither dietary cholesterol nor fat are the poisons we once thought they were. What about salt? Seems that’s getting another look as well. Does this now mean that nothing we eat is bad for us? Don’t be silly. However it does mean that diet is a much more complex and nuanced topic than it’s seemed these last several decades.
READ ONReader Maggie (nice coincidence!) writes that she’d love to make Gold Cake but that she’s in the habit of avoiding egg yolks because they’re fatty and contain cholesterol. Can I talk her down off the ledge? Maggie, I blogged about egg nutrition not too long ago, but this is a subject that bears repetition. So hear goes!
It’s very true that the yolk of an egg contains 75% of the egg’s calories, 50% of the protein and all of the fat. However for all that, the vast majority of the yolk is composed of water. A myth about egg yolks is that they’re very fatty. That’s not the case, as eggs are actually quite lean. Or lean-ish. A yolk contains just five grams of fat, about as much as a small pat of butter you’d put on your toast, but only a fraction of that fat is saturated (the so-called “bad fat”).
READ ONReader Vera wants to know if my father’s mother cooked very much considering she grew up in a farm town. The answer is that she did, though she didn’t enjoy it. Or at least that’s what she told us all years later. Cooking just wasn’t one of those things my grandmother Margaret (nicknamed “Mudge” by college friends) every really got excited about. It was just another aspect of keeping a home and raising a family.
READ ONThe magic my mother’s mother worked in the kitchen was learned. She wasn’t a natural, as she readily admitted. She grew up a bookworm on the South Side of Chicago, rather poor yet part of a privileged generation of women who were — for the first time in American history — going to college en masse. It’s commonly thought that it wasn’t until after World War II that women in America started leaving home and taking degrees in higher ed. In fact the trend started well before then, back in the teens and twenties. It was only interrupted by the war, when men went overseas and women went to work.
READ ONWhew, after five days away from home in rainy weather you should see my lawn! Lots to do and catch up on, but I’ll be back on the case as soon as I can. Those yolks aren’t getting any younger!
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In all the hubbub of traveling this week I forgot to post this short tutorial. This sauce (really a syrup) is simplicity itself. Assemble your ingredients, then combine the sugar and cocoa powder.
READ ONThis cake from Mary Meade’s Country Cookbook (an old Chicago-area classic) is the logical follow-up to angel food cake as it calls for about the same number of yolks: 12. And in fact it’s strikingly similar in both ingredients and process. The main difference is that it needs a little chemical leavening since egg yolk foam doesn’t rise nearly as high as egg white foam. It goes like this:
8.75 ounces (1 3/4 cups) cake flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
12 egg yolks, room temperature
6 ounces (3/4 cup) milk, room temperature
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon lemon extract (or orange or almond)
7 ounces (1 cup) sugar
Any time my mother’s mother made angel food cake, you could always count on gold cake as a follow-up. After all, it was the perfect way to use up the leftover yolks. It’s not what you’d call a “classic” preparation in the wider world of pastry, but it sure was at grandma’s house.
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This is the cake my twin sister and I ate regularly out at my grandparents’ house in Wayne, Illinois. Normally we ate it plain or with a little powdered sugar sprinkled on top, usually a few berries on the side. Still, somehow I think grandma would approve of this treatment with whipped cream and chocolate sauce. She was a slender woman right up into her 90’s, but had no problem with dairy fat and/or chocolate when circumstances permitted.
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