Egg beaters = Kitchen Revolution
Egg beater evolution parallels the industrial revolution in many ways.
Through most of the 19th century, many homes had servants whose life purpose was to spend hours pounding, beating, and hand-whipping eggs and other foods. Early cookbooks were written primarily for a household’s servants, not for the mistress or master who purchased the books. Rarely did they do any cooking themselves, but hosts and hostesses would happily take credit for the well-frothed meals served in their homes, with all that hard labor done by people working in large unventilated kitchens.
Early food processing machines, like egg beaters, were seen as “kitchen robots,” but in a poor or middle-class household, the woman usually had to do all that hard labor herself, sometimes also tending the cows or chickens on the first floor or outside.
The Industrial Revolution changed roles and thinking about how things were made and allowed for the manufacture of even egg beaters and other metal gadgets to make easier the lives of homemakers and home cooks.
From the late 1850s through the 1890s, 692 separate patents were issued for newfangled egg beaters alone, with each design someone’s bright idea of how to make beating and whipping faster and faster and better and better.
Many egg beaters suffered from bad design and fell apart, with the Turner Williams or Dover egg beater of 1870 the longest lasting. It employed basically two roundish beaters instead of one, and a rotary disc synchronized to turn both wheels.
Egg beaters whipped up the gadget market just in time to whip up egg whites for sweet frothy desserts such as creams, charlottes, trifles, meringues and syllabubs. Even if the housewife did her own cooking, she gained prestige if she used an egg beater. Those who had kitchen servants got more out of the workers with less arm labor than with a balloon whisk.
The whisk allowed a cook to hold the bowl with one hand and whip with the other, whereas the rotary egg beater required both hands with nothing left to hold the bowl.
Mixers of various kinds followed, leading to Carl Sontheimer’s invention of the Cuisinart.