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Chocolate Raspberry Meringue
1 cup powdered sugar 4 tablespoons raspberry jam 2 squares Lowney's Premium Chocolate, melted 1 tablespoon lemon juice Beat the whites of eggs until stiff, using fork or flat beater; add remaining ingredients very slowly, and beat constantly.
Serve with beaten cream, flavored with wine or vanilla. The above mixture may be taken up in spoonfuls and poached in hot water, or may be used for éclairs, cream puffs, or cream pie, or served plain in frappé glasses.
An uncooked chocolate meringue from a chocolate maker's promotional book, meant to be eaten soft rather than baked crisp. Two things need sorting before you start: the recipe never tells you how many egg whites to use, and the melted chocolate is the step most likely to ruin it.
- The missing egg whitesThe ingredient list omits the quantity entirely, an error carried in the original. One cup of sugar with 2 oz of chocolate and 4 tablespoons of jam suits roughly 3 to 4 large whites; fewer and the mixture will not hold air against that much added weight.
- "Powdered sugar"In American books of this period powdered sugar usually meant a fine granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Either works here, but modern confectioners' sugar dissolves faster and gives a slightly softer, cloudier meringue.
- Lowney's Premium ChocolateAn unsweetened baking chocolate. A "square" in books of this period is generally reckoned at about 1 oz, so two squares is roughly 2 oz of unsweetened chocolate; the cup of sugar is carrying all the sweetness.
- Adding the chocolateThe hinge of the recipe. Melted chocolate meeting cold, wet egg foam will seize into hard specks. Have it barely warm and fluid, around body temperature, and stream it in very slowly while beating, as the text says, rather than tipping it in at once.
- Raw egg whitesServed plain in glasses or with cream, this is never cooked. Use pasteurized whites, or in-shell pasteurized eggs, if you are serving it uncooked. Only the poached version brings the whites to any real temperature; used as a filling for eclairs or cream puffs the mixture goes in raw.
- Poaching in hot waterWater just under a simmer, about 170-180F, never boiling, or the spoonfuls will inflate and collapse. Two to three minutes a side is enough; they should firm up but stay yielding.
- "Beaten cream" and the winePlain whipped cream. A fortified wine such as sherry or Madeira is the likeliest reading of "wine" here, about a tablespoon to a cup of cream, added at the end so the cream does not thin.
- Frappé glasses and yieldSmall stemmed glasses, the sort used for iced desserts. Expect four to six servings, and serve within an hour or two, as an uncooked meringue with jam and lemon juice in it will begin to weep.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate and cocoa manufacturer, and compiled by Maria Willett Howard, who is usually described as associated with the Boston Cooking School. Like Baker's promotional books of the same years, its purpose was to get a branded product into as many recipes as possible, which is why the chocolate here is specified by name and grade. The dish itself belongs to an older European family of uncooked and poached meringues, the same technique behind oeufs a la neige and floating island, where spoonfuls of sweetened white are set in hot water rather than an oven. What marks it as American and turn-of-the-century is the offhand list of alternative uses at the end: the same bowl of meringue is offered as an eclair filling, a cream pie, or a glassful of dessert, the kind of one-mixture-many-desserts economy that runs through household cookbooks of the period.