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Dear friends, I had such plans today.  I am housebound, at home with a nasty head cold.  Normally when I'm not feeling well, I take advantage of the time at home to watch a few hours worth of cartoons or cooking shows.  Today, though, I felt anxious and jumpy after about an hour, and found myself in the kitchen with a bowl of cut lemons and a box of kosher salt, scrubbing the oxidized copper off the surface of my big copper bowl.

In general, I am not a bug for fancy cookware.  I do have some enameled cast-iron Dutch ovens that I received as Christmas presents, and that I would not give away for love or money; I have a couple pieces of nice French tinned bakeware and some heavy steel bread pans, but with the exception of the bakeware, the most-used items in the kitchen are our cast-iron skillets, for which I don't think we've ever paid more than twenty bucks.  I have no plans to buy those nasty Calphalon pans that feature in kitchenware catalogs; I don't really understand why All-Clad bakeware is supposed to be better than the pans I've bought for a third of the price; and I don't care how many people swear by Emile Henry pie pans:  I've tried them, and they do *not* give a better crust than the Pyrex pans I buy at the hardware store. 

Having dissembled like mad about why you don't always need the big fancy, I will now backpedal and say that the copper bowl has been worth it.  I think about what I paid for it, and how often I use it, and I figure that by now, the bowl costs me about sixty cents per use.  The only drawback to the bowl is that it is big and heavy, which is why my mom thoughtfully gave me a smaller one for Christmas, the perfect size for beating two or three egg whites, or for making zabaglione.

Yes, it's easier to beat egg whites in the mixer, particularly if you've been skipping your tricep exercises at the gym and you are sheepish about the, er, extraneous movements of your arms.  Yes, it's a bit of a grind to go through the lemon-and-salt routine every time you want to beat some eggs.  Once you reconcile yourself to the idea, though, you get a double payoff:  You get better egg whites, and you get to look at something really beautiful.

One of the best descriptions of the effects of beating egg whites in a copper bowl comes from Shirley O. Corriher's Cookwise.  She said she had understood that egg whites beaten in a copper bowl achieve better volume, so she was disappointed when she put the theory to the test and discovered that the volume was the same as those egg whites that were beaten in other bowls.  That disappointment turned to pleasure, though, when the egg whites were turned into souffles and baked:  the souffle with the copper-beaten egg whites rose to twice the volume, and produced a more stable structure.  She consulted with an egg researcher at Purdue University who told her that when air is beaten into egg whites, the air bubbles are linked together by a protein called conalbumin, which surrounds the bubbles.  Conalbumin combines well with copper, so when egg whites are beaten against a copper surface for more than a minute or two, the copper combines with the conalbumin to form a compound called (no surprises here) copperconalbumin, which is more stable, does not dry out as easily, does not weep fluid as readily, and has a higher coagulation temperature than conalbumin.

I am glad to know that copper-beaten egg whites perform better in cookery, because they are just plain fun to beat; while they don't whip as quickly as they do in a mixer, they do whip pretty quickly if you just apply plenty of elbow grease.  I am smiting my forehead for not taking a picture of the bowl of egg whites I beat for the cake I made on Sunday, because it is probably one of the most beautiful things I've seen in a kitchen since last summer's cherry pies.  Ah, well, this just gives me an incentive to bake another cake, and to take another picture.  In the meantime, this is what the bowl looks like after a fresh application of lemon juice and salt, rinsed and buffed.  The first time I used the bowl, I was sad that I had to mar that beautiful surface, but now I know better:  the real beauty is in use, and the more I use it, the more beautiful it gets.