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Apple Meringue
teaspoon salt 2 cups milk 1 teaspoon vanilla Core apples and bake until tender. Make a custard of the remaining ingredients; pour over baked apples. Cover with meringue made of the whites of the eggs and three tablespoons powdered sugar.
The page as printed picks up mid-ingredient-list, so the quantities of apples, eggs and sugar are lost. What survives is a clear enough method: baked apples under a soft custard, finished with a meringue.
- The missing ingredientsOnly "teaspoon salt, 2 cups milk, 1 teaspoon vanilla" survive from the list. A custard on 2 cups of milk would commonly take something like 3 to 4 eggs and a third of a cup of sugar, and perhaps half a dozen apples, but all of those figures are guesswork, not the book's own.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this period "powdered sugar" often meant a sugar ground finer than granulated rather than the modern cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar, though the terminology was not consistent. Superfine (caster) sugar is probably the closer match for the meringue and dissolves better in the whites.
- Baking the apples"Bake until tender" is all the book gives; in a modern oven a moderate heat for something under an hour suits medium cooking apples. Leaving the skin on (the recipe specifies only coring) helps them hold shape. They should yield to a knife without collapsing, since they have to survive further baking.
- The custard is the hingeWhether the custard is baked over the apples or stirred on the stove and poured over, egg custard begins to curdle somewhere above about 175F. Keep the heat gentle, use a water bath if baking, and stop while the centre still trembles. A boiled-hard custard weeps around the apples and no meringue will disguise it.
- Setting the meringueWhip the whites to soft peaks, add the sugar a spoonful at a time and beat to a stiff gloss. Spread it so it touches the dish all round, which keeps it from shrinking, and give it a moderate oven only until the peaks colour.
- Yield and servingRoughly one apple per person, however many the lost list called for. Serve barely warm or at room temperature; refrigeration makes the meringue bead and weep.
Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and like other maker-sponsored cookbooks of the era it surrounded its chocolate recipes with a full general repertoire so that the volume earned a place on the kitchen shelf. Apple meringue is a dish in which baked or stewed fruit is bound with a milk-and-egg custard, and the meringue lid exists largely because the custard has already used the yolks. The technique is the same one behind lemon meringue pie and queen of puddings, both firmly established by the 1900s; what distinguishes this version is that the apples stay whole rather than being reduced to sauce, so the dish arrives at table as separate domed portions under a common cap of white.