Meringue
Whites 2 eggs. 2 tablespoons powdered sugar. 1/4 teaspoon lemon or orange extract.
PROCESS: Beat whites until stiff and dry; add sugar by the teaspoonful; continue beating. Add flavoring, drop by drop. Spread unevenly over pie and bake fifteen minutes in a slow oven; brown the last five minutes of baking.
A pie topping rather than a standalone dish, printed as part of a longer dinner menu — which is why the egg whites themselves never appear in the ingredient list.
- The missing ingredientThe whites are assumed from the pie recipe this topping accompanies. The two tablespoons of sugar printed here point to only one or two whites at the usual period proportions; the book states neither the number of whites nor the size of pie.
- "Slow oven"Roughly 275-325F. The long, low bake sets the meringue through without shrinking it away from the crust; for the final browning, raise the heat or move the pie to an upper rack.
- Powdered sugarModern confectioners' sugar carries around 3 percent cornstarch, which is no handicap here — it helps stabilise the foam. Superfine granulated works too, but add it more slowly so it dissolves; undissolved sugar is commonly blamed for the amber beads that appear on the surface.
- "Stiff and dry"Take this less literally than written. Beat to firm peaks with a glossy surface; whites whipped genuinely dry are grainy and separate in the oven. Sugar added a teaspoon at a time, as instructed, is the safeguard.
- Flavouring drop by dropNot fussiness. Alcohol-based extract poured in at once will slacken a finished foam, so add it at the very end, with the beater running.
- Spread unevenlyDeliberate. The peaks and hollows are what colour attractively. Seal the meringue to the crust rim all the way round or it will contract and slide.
- Warm fillingSpread the meringue over a filling that is still hot. Cold filling under hot meringue is the usual cause of a watery layer between the two.
- YieldThe recipe does not state a pie size; the quantities as printed suit a single pie's worth of topping.
Meringue reached English and American cookbooks from France, and the name is traditionally traced to the Swiss town of Meiringen, though the etymology is unproven and other origins have been proposed. What is documented is that beaten-white sugar confections were being baked in European kitchens by the late seventeenth century, and that the arrival of reliable hand-cranked egg beaters in the second half of the nineteenth century turned meringue from a labour of long whisking into something a household cook could produce between courses. Books of this kind treat it as an afterthought — a short paragraph appended to a pie, with the eggs taken for granted.