Eggs

What an egg allergy is

An egg allergy is a reaction to the proteins in hen’s egg. Those proteins are not distributed evenly: most of the ones commonly implicated — ovalbumin, ovomucoid, ovomucin, conalbumin — sit in the white, while the yolk carries livetins and vitellin. Industrially the two halves are separated and sold apart, so a product can contain one and not the other, and the label may name only the fraction it used. That is the whole reason egg has so many aliases. Like milk, it hides behind chemistry rather than behind folk names or translations.

Egg is also a functional ingredient rather than a flavour, which spreads it into places that taste nothing like egg. It binds burgers and fish cakes, emulsifies dressings, glazes pastry, clarifies stock and consommé, aerates mousse and marshmallow, fines some wines, and gives fresh pasta its colour. None of that announces itself on the plate.

The names that do not say “egg”

Albumen is the egg white. Albumin — the spelling with the i — is the family of proteins in it, and the two words are used interchangeably on labels. Ovalbumin is the single most abundant of them. Ovomucin and ovomucoid are two more white proteins, and conalbumin is another.

Globulin is a general protein class, not exclusive to egg, but on an ingredient list next to other egg fractions it means the egg globulins.

Livetin and ovovitellin (also written vitellin) are yolk proteins. A product listing vitellin has used yolk.

Lysozyme, additive number E1105, is an enzyme purified from egg white and used as a preservative — it appears in some hard cheeses, where it suppresses unwanted fermentation, and as a fining agent in wine.

Meringue and meringue powder are whipped egg white and sugar, on pies, in mixes, and inside biscuits.

Mayonnaise is an egg yolk emulsion, and so are aioli, hollandaise, remoulade, tartare sauce and most Caesar dressings. Egg-free versions exist, but the word itself implies egg.

Surimi — the fish paste sold as crab sticks — is frequently bound with egg white as well as starch.

Simplesse is a trade name for a microparticulated protein fat replacer; it is made from whey protein, egg white, or both, so it is worth treating as a question rather than a known quantity.

Egg lecithin is possible but uncommon; bare “lecithin” is far more often soy or sunflower.

How the label is worded where you are

In the EU and UK, egg must be emphasised inside the ingredient list, so the technical fractions cannot stand alone — ovalbumin has to be shown as egg, usually by bolding the word egg alongside it. The rules name two exceptions to declaration: lysozyme produced from egg and used in wine, and egg albumin used as a fining agent in wine and cider. Those are exempt altogether, not merely from the emphasis, so a wine fined with albumen need not mention egg.

In the United States the plain word egg must appear, either bracketed after the ingredient or in a “Contains” line, which makes albumin and lysozyme easy to catch. Outside those systems you may get the technical name in the local language with no emphasis and no summary line.

Cross-contamination and “may contain”

Egg is heavily represented in precautionary labelling because bakeries, pasta makers and sauce plants run egg-containing and egg-free recipes through the same mixers, nozzles and fryers. “May contain egg” and “made on equipment that also processes egg” are voluntary almost everywhere, unstandardised, and not arranged in a legal order of severity — the difference between two phrasings usually reflects the manufacturer’s lawyers, not the production line. The absence of a warning is not evidence that no egg came near. Loose bakery items, deli counters and fresh pasta sold by weight carry no ingredient list at all, and egg glazes and dusting mixes are applied after the dough is made. PNut reports any such wording as May contain rather than resolving it either way, which is the honest position — see what “may contain traces” actually means for how much weight one of those lines can carry.

Reading an egg label abroad

The base word is short and usually easy to spot — huevo, œuf, Ei, uovo, 蛋. The difficulty is the compounds. Eiweiß, blanc d’œuf, albume and 蛋白 all mean egg white, and pasta all’uovo buries the word inside a product name. Italian, French and Chinese labels also tend to use the white and the yolk as separate ingredients, so there are two or three words to watch rather than one. The table below gives the base word and the white for each language, and the rest of the technique — finding the list, reading the order, spotting a translated sticker — is in reading a label in a language you don’t speak.

How PNut flags eggs

Scan the barcode and PNut looks up the product’s published ingredient list; photograph the ingredient panel and it reads the text off the label instead, in any of 40+ languages. It checks for egg and for every fraction and alias on this page, then gives one of four verdicts — Safe, Contains allergen, May contain, or Unknown when the label cannot be read. An unreadable or incomplete label returns Unknown rather than a guess.