Meringues
1 cup fine granulated sugar ½ teaspoon vanilla Add salt to eggs; beat until very stiff. Add two tablespoons sugar, beat five minutes. So continue until half the sugar is used. When very stiff, cut and fold in the remaining sugar. Drop by spoonfuls on to wet paper on inverted dripping pan. Bake in slow oven thirty minutes. Remove from paper; take out uncooked portion; dry in oven. Cool and fill with whipped cream or ice cream. Arrange in pairs. + cup butter 1 cup molasses 1 cup boiling water 1 egg
A classic hard meringue shell, built on the slow method of beating sugar into the whites a spoonful at a time. The written instructions are sound; the vocabulary and equipment need translating.
- The egg whitesThe ingredient list as printed does not state how many whites or how much salt. One cup of fine granulated sugar is the standard proportion for four large egg whites, with a pinch of salt; work to that ratio rather than guessing at a larger batch.
- Slow ovenIn books of this period a slow oven covers roughly 250-300F; for meringues work at the low end, and lower is better than higher. Thirty minutes at that heat will set small shells; a browned meringue has been baked too hot.
- Dripping pan, invertedA dripping pan is the shallow roasting pan that sat under a joint. Inverting it gives a flat baking surface with no rim, so the shells can be slid off; a modern rimless cookie sheet or an overturned sheet pan does the same job.
- Wet paperUnglazed paper was dampened so the meringues would release. Parchment or a silicone mat removes the problem entirely, and neither needs wetting.
- Beating in stagesTwo tablespoons of sugar, five minutes of beating, repeated until half is in, is the hinge of the recipe. It helps the sugar dissolve and gives a stable, glossy shell. A stand mixer shortens each stage, but do not add sugar faster than it dissolves -- rub a little between your fingers to check for grit.
- Taking out the uncooked portionThese are meant to be hollow cases. Press the soft centre out of the underside with a spoon while the shells are still warm, then return them to a turned-off or very low oven to dry out completely before filling.
- Filling and yieldFilled with whipped cream or ice cream and sandwiched in pairs, one cup of sugar's worth of meringue makes roughly eight to ten pairs of tablespoon-sized shells. Fill only at the moment of serving; the cases go soft within the hour.
- HumidityMeringue shells absorb moisture from the air. Bake them on a dry day if you can, and store the empty shells airtight rather than loose on a rack.
Meringue as a technique — egg whites whipped with sugar and dried rather than baked — was well established in European confectionery by the eighteenth century, and the name is generally traced to French usage, though the origin of the word itself has never been settled. What is distinctive here is the household context: Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company in the early twentieth century as advertising made useful, and it reflects a moment when the mechanical egg beater had made a stiff meringue an ordinary domestic possibility rather than a professional feat. The instruction to beat five minutes between each two tablespoons of sugar is the trace of that shift — a timing worth printing only for a cook who is turning a crank rather than counting strokes with a whisk.