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Apple Meringue
Pare and slice 8 sour apples. Place them in a pudding-dish and cover with a liberal amount of sugar, adding the grated rind and juice of 1 lemon. Bake until quite soft. Have the whites of 2 eggs beaten to a stiff froth, add 1 cupful of sugar. Spread over the top of the apples, and brown.
A plain baked apple dish finished with a meringue lid. The original assumes a cook who knows her oven by feel, so the numbers below fill in what is missing.
- Sour applesThese are firm cooking apples — Bramley, Granny Smith, Northern Spy — not the sweet dessert varieties. Eight medium apples is roughly 3 lb, enough for a 2-quart baking dish and six servings.
- How much sugar"A liberal amount" over the fruit means about 3/4 to 1 cup, adjusted to how sharp the apples are. Toss the slices with it rather than layering it on top, or the bottom stays sour.
- Oven and first bake350F, uncovered, for 40 to 50 minutes, until the slices collapse under a spoon. If the top is drying out before the fruit softens, cover with foil for the first half.
- The meringue ratioA cup of sugar to two egg whites is heavy by modern standards — roughly 3 1/2 oz of sugar per white against the usual 2 oz. It will bake into a firm, candy-like crust rather than a soft one. Half a cup gives a lighter meringue if that suits you better.
- Adding the sugarBeat the whites to soft peaks first, then add the sugar a spoonful at a time and keep beating to stiff, glossy peaks. Dumping a cup in at once deflates the froth and weeps syrup in the oven.
- BrowningSpread the meringue right to the edges of the dish so it seals against the rim, then return to a 350F oven for 12 to 15 minutes. A hotter oven colors the peaks before the interior sets, and the meringue slumps as it cools.
- ServingLet it stand 20 minutes before serving; hot from the oven the apple layer is molten. Cream or a thin custard is the usual accompaniment. It does not keep well overnight — the meringue draws moisture from the fruit and goes sticky.
Meringue-topped fruit puddings were one way a nineteenth-century kitchen could use up egg whites left from custards, curds and rich cakes, which consumed yolks in quantity. The pairing of apple with lemon rind and juice is older still: the acid keeps the pale slices from browning while they wait, and the aromatic oil in the zest lifts the flatness of long-baked fruit. Dishes of this kind appear in period household compilations under several loosely distinguished names -- apple snow, apple meringue and the like -- the difference generally coming down to whether the whites were folded into the fruit or piled on top of it.