Marie Newton
"Eat, drink and be merry!" 3455/ 56 Gaby Deslys Harry Pilcer
KISSES
Whites 4 eggs ½ teaspoon vanilla 1¼ cups powdered sugar, or 1 cup fine granulated Beat whites until stiff, add gradually two-thirds of sugar, and continue beating until mixture will hold its shape; fold in remaining sugar and add flavoring.
Place waxed paper on bottom of an inverted baking pan. Shape kisses on paper and bake thirty minutes over lowest flame.
Yours truly,
GABY DESLYS AND HARRY PILCER
SPINACH WITH EGG SAUCE
2 quarts spinach 2 tablespoonfuls flour 2 tablespoonfuls butter 1 egg Few grains each, nutmeg and pepper ½ cupful soup-stock Wash spinach thoroughly in several waters, finally pouring over warm water to remove any possible grit. Place in a kettle, add a little salt but no additional water, and cook gently for twenty minutes, lifting it occasionally so that the spinach will not burn. Chop fine or put through the food-chopper, return to the kettle, and add the butter melted and combined with the flour and the stock. Let this boil ten minutes, then beat the egg thoroughly, add a little of the liquor left from the spinach or, if there is none, a little cold water; mix well with the spinach and season with the pepper and nutmeg. The leaves of young beets, or kohlrabi, or new cabbage, may be prepared in this same way. Yours truly,
Two unrelated dishes share this page, and the printing has tangled their headings — the meringue recipe is signed by Gaby Deslys and Harry Pilcer, while the spinach that follows has picked up the stray signature "KISSES." Both are workable, but the sugar quantity and the oven directions need interpreting.
- The sugar is a typo"1/4 cups powdered sugar, or 1 cup fine granulated" cannot be right for four whites: a quarter cup would give a foam that weeps and collapses. Standard meringue ratio is about 1/4 cup sugar per white, so read it as 1 1/4 cups powdered — which matches the alternative of 1 cup granulated by volume closely enough.
- "Over lowest flame" means a very slow ovenThese are dried more than baked. A low oven, somewhere in the region of 200-250F, is the modern equivalent, and longer than the thirty minutes given if the centres are still tacky. Too much heat colours them, and the point of a kiss is that it stays white.
- The inverted panTurning a baking pan upside down gave a flat, rimless surface to work on and to slide the paper off, before flat cookie sheets were universal. A rimless sheet or an overturned half-sheet does the same job.
- Waxed paperWaxed paper is fine at meringue temperatures but tears and sticks; parchment or a silicone mat releases cleanly and is what to reach for.
- YieldFour whites shaped with a spoon or a plain tube give roughly 30 to 36 small kisses. Cooled completely, they keep a week in an airtight tin and go soft within hours in a humid kitchen.
- Twenty minutes is long for spinachThe period cooked greens until they were quite soft, which suits a purée that is then boiled again with sauce. If you want colour, five to seven minutes in the water clinging to the leaves is enough before chopping.
- The hinge: the egg goes in off the heatThe beaten egg is slackened with spinach liquor or cold water and stirred through at the end, after the ten-minute boil. Return the pan to a hard boil afterwards and the egg curdles into threads instead of binding the sauce.
- Soup-stock and the flour"1½ cupful" is the printed quantity; with two tablespoons each of butter and flour it makes a thin sauce, which suits a purée that is boiled again. Any light chicken or veal stock works; the butter and flour are combined and added with the stock rather than cooked as a separate roux.
Gaby Deslys was a French dancer and music-hall star of the years before and during the First World War, and Harry Pilcer the American dancer who partnered her on both sides of the Atlantic; she died in 1920, which places this contribution in the brief window of their joint fame. Celebrity cookbooks of this kind were compiled in numbers in the 1910s and 1920s, often for a charity or a theatrical benefit fund, and many of the entries are stock recipes of the day rather than anything personal to the contributor. The meringue here is the standard American "kiss," a name sometimes linked to the German Küsschen though the derivation is not settled, and in use in English cookbooks well before 1900; the spinach with egg sauce is a plain preparation of the sort found in household cookery books of the period, down to the note that beet tops, kohlrabi leaves or new cabbage may be substituted -- a reminder that greens were bought as they came and used as they came.