Sugar Kisses
Whisk the whites of four eggs to a stiff froth and stir in half a pound sifted white sugar. Flavor as you like. Lay it when stiff in heaps the size of a small egg, on white paper. Lay on a board half an inch thick and put in a hot oven. When a little yellowish, slip off two of the kisses with a knife and join the bottom parts together. Continue till all are thus prepared.--Mrs. R.
A plain meringue in its oldest form: whites, sugar, and a slow drying rather than true baking. The egg-to-sugar ratio here is exactly the classic one, so the recipe works as written once you translate the oven.
- The measurementsHalf a pound of sifted white sugar is about 1 1/8 cups granulated. Four large whites come to roughly 1/2 cup, which gives the standard 2 ounces of sugar per white.
- "A hot oven" — treat with careIn a wood-fired range "hot" was a relative judgment, and the half-inch board underneath was most likely there to shield the kisses from a scorching oven floor. Modern adaptations of recipes like this usually settle around 225-250F for about an hour to get the faintly yellowish, dry shell described; a genuinely hot modern oven will brown and crack them before the centres set.
- The board and the paperSubstitute a baking sheet lined with parchment; if your oven runs hot from below, stack a second sheet under the first. "White paper" here is plain unwaxed paper, used because meringue welds itself to bare metal.
- Beating the whitesWhisk to a stiff froth first, then add the sugar gradually rather than all at once, or the foam collapses. A pinch of salt or 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar gives insurance. More than a trace of yolk or grease in the bowl will keep the whites from stiffening properly.
- Flavoring as you likePeriod choices were vanilla, rose water, lemon extract or a few drops of almond. Keep it to a teaspoon or less of an alcohol-based extract; more liquid than that slackens the meringue.
- Joining the pairsThis is the hinge of the recipe. The bottoms must still be soft and slightly tacky when you press two together, so work straight from the oven, a few at a time, leaving the rest inside. Once fully cool they will not bond, and pressing them risks breaking the shells.
- Yield and keepingHeaps the size of a small egg give something in the region of two dozen shells, so around a dozen finished kisses. Store airtight the moment they are cold; in a humid kitchen they turn soft and chewy within hours.
"Kisses" was the standard nineteenth-century American name for a baked meringue, appearing in household books from the late 1820s onward alongside almond kisses, cocoanut kisses and chocolate kisses, all built on the same whipped-white foundation. The technique itself is older and continental, generally traced to the sugar confectionery of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when refined loaf sugar was expensive enough that a dish made of little else read as a display of means. That the sugar here must be "sifted" is a reminder that a cook might still be working from a hard cone of loaf sugar, broken, pounded and sieved at home, though by 1879 refined granulated sugar was also to be had commercially; either way, the fineness of the grind decided whether the meringue turned smooth or gritty. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) collected its contributions from named Virginia housekeepers, and a recipe like this one, signed only "Mrs. R.", shows the book's working assumption that a reader already understood her own oven and needed nothing more than proportions and the trick of pairing the halves.