Home › Sweets › Three Whites of Eggs
Three Whites of Eggs
Six ounces of castor Sugar.
Ten crystallised Cherries.
Angelica. Peel the apples thinly, core them carefully without breaking them. Put the loaf sugar, half a pint of water, cinnamon, cloves, and lemon juice in a copper stewpan, and reduce to a syrup.
Skim well, and strain into a sauté-pan. Arrange the apples neatly in the syrup, cover them with a buttered paper, and cook them in a hot oven until tender.
Lift out the apples, strain them carefully, and place them on a buttered baking-sheet. Whip the whites of eggs to a stiff froth, and mix them with the castor sugar.
Put this meringue mixture into a forcing-bag with a plain piping-tube; cover each apple completely with it, dust them with sugar, and bake them in a cool oven for fifteen minutes. The meringue crust should be quite dry and a fawn colour when taken out of the oven. Put them on the ice to cool.
Whip the cream, add a dessertspoonful of castor sugar. When the apples are cold, fill the centre of each with some of the whipped cream, dish up with little heaps of whipped cream on a cold dish. Put a crystallised cherry and two or three lozenge-shaped slices of angelica on top of each. Put the remainder of the cream in the centre of the dish, and serve.
Pouding Froid à la St.-Cloud. (Cold St. Cloud Pudding.) Ingredients.
Half a pint of strong Coffee.
This page has been mangled in the original setting: the title is a stray line from the ingredient list, the apples, loaf sugar, cream and spices are never quantified, and the last line belongs to the next recipe entirely. What survives is a complete working method for meringue-covered baked apples, and the quantities can be reasoned out from the garnish.
- What the recipe actually isWhole cored apples poached in spiced syrup, piped over with meringue, dried in a low oven and filled with whipped cream. The trailing line about half a pint of strong coffee is the opening of Pouding Froid à la St.-Cloud and has nothing to do with this dish.
- Missing quantitiesTen crystallised cherries suggests ten apples, one cherry each. On that assumption something like 12 oz loaf sugar to the half pint of water, a stick of cinnamon, a few cloves, the juice of a lemon and about half a pint of cream will serve, but none of it is in the text. The only ratio on the page is the three whites of eggs of the stray title line to six ounces of castor sugar, which is a standard stiff meringue.
- Castor sugar and loaf sugarCastor sugar is superfine or caster sugar; granulated pulsed briefly in a processor stands in. Loaf sugar was sugar broken from a cone, prized for boiling clear syrups; plain granulated does the same job now.
- Oven temperaturesA hot oven for the poaching stage is 400-425F, though the apples sit in syrup under paper and are really being braised. The cool oven for drying the meringue is 250-275F; at 350F the meringue browns and weeps instead of setting fawn and dry.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche: a disc of parchment cut to the pan, buttered side down on the fruit, to keep the apples submerged in steam and stop the tops drying. Parchment replaces the buttered paper exactly.
- The hinge: apples that hold their shapeEverything depends on choosing a firm cooking apple that will not collapse when cored whole and simmered. Bramley will blow apart; a Braeburn, Golden Delicious or Granny Smith holds. Test with a skewer early, since ten minutes past tender leaves nothing to pipe on.
- Copper stewpan and sauté-panCopper stewpan and saute-pan -- Copper was specified for even heat when reducing sugar syrup. Any heavy-based pan works; the wide saute-pan is presumably so that the apples can sit in a single layer rather than stacked.
- Forcing-bag and angelicaA forcing-bag with a plain tube is a piping bag with a plain round nozzle. Candied angelica, cut into diamond lozenges, is still sold by cake-decorating suppliers and by some Italian grocers; thin strips of candied citron or green glacé cherry are the usual substitutes.
- Put them on the iceKitchens of the period chilled by setting dishes on a block of ice. Refrigerate instead, but only once the meringue is fully dry, or the shell will soften.
- YieldTen apples if the cherry count is the guide, one per person as a dessert course.
Baked apples under a piped meringue shell — pommes meringuées in the French kitchen vocabulary that governed British high-class cookery around 1900 — were a staple of the professional sweets repertoire because they make a handsome dish and can be built entirely in advance. The pattern here is thoroughly Escoffier-era: fruit poached in a clear spiced syrup rather than baked dry, a meringue coat dried rather than browned, and a garnish of crystallised cherry and angelica lozenges that appears on hundreds of period puddings and cakes as the standard red-and-green finish. Angelica, the candied stem of Angelica archangelica, was shelf-stable and did the decorative work that pistachio or mint does now. The recipe assumes the reader already knows how many apples to buy; the quantities are missing, and it is not clear from the page itself why.