Baking and pastry

Monter en bec d’oiseau is the moment a recipe stops timing and starts looking. Lift the whisk out of the beaten whites: if a short point stands up on the wires and curls over at the very tip without collapsing, the whites are ready. That little hook is the beak, and French names the stage after a bird. English grades the same thing by height, and its words are all one picture: « soft peaks », « firm peaks », « stiff peaks », a mountain range in three sizes. The two scales send the eye to different places. A peak is about how far the point rises, which is easy to overstate; a beak is about whether the tip bends over, which either happens or does not. That is why the French stage is the finer of the two, and why it comes after monter en neige rather than instead of it. It is worth knowing that le bec works hard elsewhere in the language as well: clouer le bec à quelqu’un is to shut someone up, une prise de bec is a squabble, and rester le bec dans l’eau is to be left standing there with nothing.