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Centennial Drops
White of one egg beaten to a stiff froth, quarter pound pulverized sugar, half tea-spoon baking-powder; flavor with lemon; butter tins and drop with tea-spoon about three inches apart; bake in a slow oven and serve with ice-cream. This is also a very nice recipe for icing.-Miss Alice Trimble, Mt. Gilead, Ohio.
A meringue drop in all but name, thickened with a little baking powder in the style of the 1870s. The whole thing turns on how dry the beaten white is before the sugar goes in.
- The hinge: beat to stiff, then foldThe white must hold a firm peak before any sugar is added, and the sugar folded in rather than stirred, or the drops slump and weep syrup on the tin. Powdered sugar dissolves fast, so a light hand is enough.
- Quarter pound pulverized sugarThat is 4 oz, roughly 1 cup of modern confectioners' sugar, sifted. Nineteenth-century pulverized sugar was ground cane sugar with no cornstarch; today's version carries 3 percent or so, which only helps the drops hold shape.
- The baking powderHalf a teaspoon in one egg white is a period habit rather than a necessity, and it will give a slightly puffed, cakier drop with a faint chemical edge. Leaving it out produces a cleaner meringue.
- "A slow oven"The book gives no temperatures; a slow oven in period usage is generally reckoned somewhere around 250-325F. At the upper end of that range meringues color to pale tan and stay a little chewy inside; a dry, white, crisp drop wants 200-225F for an hour or more, then cooling in the turned-off oven.
- Butter tinsA buttered metal tin is a poor surface for meringue, which tends to spread and stick and can tear when lifted. Parchment or a silicone mat lifts them off whole.
- Flavoring with lemonThe recipe does not say which form; lemon extract or oil of lemon was commonly used in this period. Grated zest works, but avoid juice, which is enough liquid to soften the foam.
- Yield and servingYield varies with drop size and how well the foam holds; expect roughly a couple of dozen teaspoon-sized drops. They are meant as a crisp accompaniment to ice cream and go soft within hours in a humid kitchen; store airtight the day they are baked.
- As icingUsed unbaked and spread on a cake, this is a raw uncooked egg-white icing. Set on a cake that then goes into the oven it is fine; left raw on a finished cake it carries the usual raw-egg caveat, and pasteurized whites or meringue powder answer for that.
The name most likely points to the Centennial of 1876 and the Philadelphia exhibition, after which the word was attached to all manner of things, kitchen receipts included. The dish itself is older than its title, being a plain kisses-or-meringue drop of the kind English and American cookbooks had printed for generations, with baking powder added in a period when chemical leavening was becoming commercially available in American kitchens. The attribution to Miss Alice Trimble of Mt. Gilead reflects the compiled-contribution method of Ohio community cookbooks of the 1870s, in which recipes gathered from many correspondents were printed under their contributors' names.