On Food and Cooking

sugar-egg mixture being harder to spread into
thin bubble walls. Slow foaming is a real
disadvantage when the whites are whipped by
hand — at standard soft-meringue levels, it
doubles the work — but less so if you’re using
a stand mixer.
The helpful thing about sugar is that it
improves the foam’s stability. By making the
liquid thick and cohesive, sugar greatly slows
drainage from the bubble walls and
coarsening of texture. In the oven, the
dissolved sugar hangs onto the water
molecules and so delays their evaporation in
the high heat until after ovalbumin has had
time to coagulate and reinforce the raw foam.
And it eventually contributes reinforcement of
its own in the form of fine but solid, cotton-
candy-like strands of dry sugar.
Sugar is usually incorporated into the egg
whites after the foam has begun to form, when
many proteins are already unfolded. For some
purposes, cooks will mix sugar and whites at