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A Sweet Quartet
Sugar, Almonds, Eggs and Butter: A Baker's Tour Including 33 Recipes
By Fran Gage
So many desserts and pastries, from creme brulee to virtually every cake in existence, depend on eggs. Weighing less than 2 ounces, an egg possesses the chemical properties for countless baking feats. It is a powerful player in a baker's repertoire. Beaten egg whites trap air that can make a cake rise, bake into crisp meringues or make a silky meringue to fold into a mousse or mound on a lemon tart. Egg yolks add their richness to ice cream, pastry and butter cream. Heated and beaten with wine and sugar, egg yolks foam into an almost instant dessert.
Butter's unctuousness vies with its taste in determining its importance to pastries and desserts. Its starring role in puff pastry, with support from flour, water and salt, is a prime example. If the ingredients were simply mixed together in a bowl, a leaden paste would result. But assembled in a certain way – fashioned into a soft dough made with the flour, water, salt and part of the butter, then wrapped around a larger piece of butter, rolled and folded numerous times, resting between each "turn" – they make a delicate construction of hundreds of layers of dough interspersed with sheets of butter that, in a hot oven, will release steam, pushing the dough to triple its height and giving an incomparable tender crispness.
How can I best convey my appreciation and spread my enthusiasm for these essential ingredients? With recipes, certainly, but each offers so much more. Each has a rich past, beginning before recorded history. And each has a complicated story to tell, right up to the present. I want to make the ingredients come alive, to celebrate their essences. However sterilely it is packaged, each begins on a farm. I realized I had to start there too. So I made phone calls and sent e-mails, looking for sources and information. Rather than merely talking to people who processed sugarcane, grew almonds, kept chickens or milked cows, I knew I needed to visit the cane fields, then the mill and refinery. I needed to walk through an orchard with a farmer, not merely open a bag of almonds in my kitchen. I needed to peer inside a chicken coop, to visit dairy cows. My research took me far from home – to Louisiana, a major sugarcane producer in this country, and to France, home of the butter some think is the best in the world. Visits alone weren't sufficient; I needed to read to fill in the gaps and to give the tales a sense of history. 
And I needed to taste. All the visiting and reading and time in my kitchen stirred memories, so I wove them into the stories too.