Home › Desserts › Chocolate Swedish Meringues
Chocolate Swedish Meringues
teaspoon cream of tartar 1 cup sugar 1 cup Lowney's Cocoa ½ cup flour teaspoon vanilla Beat the whites of eggs until foamy; add cream of tartar, sugar and cocoa. Continue beating until spoon will stand up in mixture; add vanilla and fold in the flour. Bake in buttered shallow pans in a moderate oven about twenty minutes. Put cakes together with following filling, and decorate top with filling and candied fruit and nuts.
A meringue-based layer cake rather than a crisp meringue: the whites carry a cup each of sugar and cocoa plus a little flour, so the result is dense and fudgy at the edges. Two things in the text need attention before you begin.
- The egg whites are missingThe line "Beat the whites of eggs" has no number attached, and the ingredient list as printed opens mid-item. For a cup of sugar and a cup of cocoa, four to six whites is the plausible range; the recipe as it stands does not tell you, so treat the quantity as unresolved rather than assume.
- Cream of tartar, also unquantifiedThe list reads only "teaspoon cream of tartar," as the vanilla line reads only "teaspoon vanilla"; whether a fraction has dropped out in printing or a full spoon was meant cannot be settled from the page. Usual stabilising amounts run about an eighth of a teaspoon per white; err on the low side, as a large quantity risks a sour edge against the cocoa.
- Add the sugar graduallyDumping a cup of sugar and a cup of cocoa into foamy whites at once, as written, will knock much of the air out. Beat the sugar in a spoonful at a time until the meringue is glossy and holds a spoon upright, then sift the cocoa over and fold.
- The cocoaLowney's was almost certainly a natural, non-alkalized cocoa, as American cocoas of the period generally were: acidic, and fine enough to sift. A cup weighs roughly 3 oz / 85 g. Dutch-process cocoa will work but reads flatter and darker, and it removes the acid the cream of tartar was partnering.
- Fold the flour, do not beat itThis is the hinge. Half a cup of flour stirred in hard will collapse the meringue and you will bake a leathery slab. Sift it over the surface and cut it through in as few strokes as will do the job.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. Twenty minutes suits shallow layers about half an inch deep; the tops should be dry and lightly cracked while the centres stay soft.
- Shallow pansButter them and line the bottoms with parchment. Cocoa meringue grips bare metal and tears when you try to lift a layer out for assembly.
- Filling and yieldThe "following filling" is a separate entry in the original book and is not reproduced here; any firm chocolate or coffee buttercream will do the same work. Yield cannot be fixed while the egg-white count and pan size are unknown; assemble no more than a few hours ahead, as the meringue softens once filled.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate and cocoa manufacturer, and belongs to the large family of American cookbooks issued by food firms to teach cooks new uses for a branded product — hence "Lowney's Cocoa" written into the ingredient list itself rather than plain cocoa. The name "Swedish meringues" is the sort of loose national label Anglo-American dessert writing applied freely around 1900; Scandinavian baking does have a long tradition of meringue and nut layer cakes built from whipped whites and sugar with little or no butter, and the style is generally traced to that tradition rather than to any single documented recipe. What marks this one as American and of its moment is the cocoa: cheap, defatted, mass-milled cocoa powder was a late nineteenth-century product, and recipes like this exist to prove it could stand in for melted chocolate anywhere a cook might want it.