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Rose Meringues
Take as many meringues as may be required (see MERINGUES), pale in colour, and alike in size and shape. Mix a little sifted icing-sugar to a soft paste with white of egg, and dip the edges in, and build up the meringues in tiers, with a hollow space inside. Garnish with about an ounce of crystallized rose-leaves, using a little of the icing for sticking them on. Fill the centre with whipped cream, flavoured as preferred, and close the top with one or more meringues and a little pile of rose-leaves. Crystallised violets may be used in place of rose-leaves. Probable cost, about 4s.
This is an assembly recipe rather than a cooked one: the meringues are made elsewhere in the book and here they are cemented into a hollow tower with royal icing and filled with cream. The hinge is the icing — too thin and the structure slumps, too stiff and it will not grip.
- "Pale in colour"The shells should be dried out slowly rather than browned. A very low oven, then left in the switched-off oven to finish, is the usual modern equivalent; this page gives no temperature. Any golden colour means the sugar has begun to caramelise, which changes the texture of the shell.
- The icing "paste"This is royal icing: sifted icing (confectioners') sugar beaten with raw egg white until it holds a firm ribbon. Aim for a consistency close to toothpaste. Note that it is never cooked, so use pasteurised egg white, or meringue powder, if serving anyone who should avoid raw egg.
- Crystallised rose-leavesVictorian usage means rose petals, not the foliage — candied in gum arabic and sugar. Sold today as crystallised rose or violet petals in cake-decorating suppliers. An ounce is roughly 30 g, which is generous for one tower.
- Build orderSet the base ring of meringues on the serving dish first and let the icing firm up before adding the next tier. Each ring should sit slightly inside the one below so the weight falls on shell, not on air.
- Fill lastWhipped cream goes in immediately before serving. Meringue draws moisture from cream and begins to soften within an hour; a tower filled in the morning will be sagging by dinner.
- Flavouring "as preferred"To match the garnish, a few drops of rosewater and a spoonful of caster sugar in the cream is the obvious choice — rosewater is potent, so start with a quarter teaspoon per half pint of cream.
- Probable costFour shillings was a substantial sum for a dessert in the late Victorian period, and marks this as a dinner-party dish rather than a family pudding.
- YieldThe recipe specifies no number: "as many meringues as may be required". A tower of this kind with half a pint (300 ml) of cream will serve a table, and has to be broken down to be served.
Meringues built into hollow towers and filled with cream belong to the late nineteenth-century confectioner's repertoire, where the same logic produced the vacherin: small, cheap, sugar-heavy components assembled into architecture that justified a place on the dinner table. The garnish is the period's real signature. Crystallised rose and violet petals rom that that also supplied candied angelica and gilded comfits — were a mark of a fashionable dessert in the 1880s and 1890s, and what the recipe chiefly teaches is assembly and finish rather than heat. Rosewater and rose petals in sweets are far older than this, reaching English cookery through Persian and Arab confectionery by way of medieval and Tudor kitchens; by the Victorian era the flavour had been pushed almost entirely into the sugar course.