(or clarified egg whites, also may be referred to as avi, albumen, or clarea)
A simple recipe:
- Get 2 room-temp eggs (if they’re not warm enough, let them sit in a bowl of lukewarm water for a
few minutes) - Separate whites and yolks
- Put about half an eggshell’s worth of water into the whites
- Mix it till it’s frothy. In the 11th century, this was done using a wooden whip.1
- Drain/sieve the liquid into a new jar
- This liquid is the “glair.” It’s better when aged. I would let it rest at least a day but it’s much better if left to sit for longer. It can be quite brittle when first made. (Some medieval recipes suggest waiting months.) If you do this, put a drop of clove or rosemary oil or a little vinegar in as a preservative (and also to minimize scent). You can keep this at room temperature.
As an aside, beating egg whites was not the only way to make glair in the medieval period. Sometimes the white of an egg was squeezed in and out of a sponge or separated with a cloth filter. I have not done this.
The writer in De clarea (1050-1100) has strong opinions on the matter:
There are two kinds of glair, one of which is made by beating and the other by pressing. The one made by pressing is considerably more brittle or weak than the beaten kind, and is, moreover, contaminated; since, being repeatedly squeezed or filtered through wool or cloth, it picks up dirt from the hand of the person who presses it…And anyone who wants to convince himself of this by experiment may try out each sort, that is, the beaten glair and the squeezed kind, and he will see plainly how very clear the former is and how turbid the latter.2
- This is noted by an anonymous writer in De clarea, written about 1050-1100. Original manuscript can be found here: https://fragmentarium.ms/overview/F-6hg6. My reference comes from pgs. 50-51. Thompson, Daniel V. 2012. The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting. Dover Publications. Available online at: https://archive.org/details/materialstechniq00thom ↩︎
- Thompson, pg. 51 for translated source. ↩︎
Leave a Reply