Tapping the egg gently on the counter, carefully pulling the shell apart at the resulting crack, she began the deliberate process of separating egg yolk from egg white. This step was always the most absorbing part of making a lemon meringue pie. You had to be so careful to not let the yolk break along the sharp edge of the shell. It could not be permitted to ooze out with the strings of white. An errant spot of yolk would irretrievably contaminate the whites, making it impossible to whisk them into peaks of stiff meringue.
Some day she’d have to read up on the chemistry of this. For now, she let herself sink into the careful back and forth of the egg yolk, gently tipping it from shell half to shell half, while the separated white dripped off the shell’s edge into the waiting bowl. This would be done six times, so there had to be an intermediate bowl. Separate the white into that small bowl, then drop the yolk into the pudding bowl, toss the shell into the compost bucket, and pour the white into the meringue bowl. Repeat. If a snippet of yolk got into the white, well it was only one egg that needed to be repurposed. It would be set aside for tomorrow’s omelett, and the bowl of already-separated whites wouldn’t be affected. It was always a good idea to have some extra eggs for this process.
Really, lemon meringue pies were the perfect dessert. You used the entire egg. Too often when she’d separated eggs for a pudding, the whites sat in the fridge, forgotten until they desiccated. And if she made divinity or meringues, the yolks were similarly wasted. With a lemon meringue pies, the issue never came up.
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