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Mushroom Meringue
Make a round of meringue mixture size of a quarter.
Shape stems by drawing mixture upward. Sprinkle tops with cocoa. Bake in moderate oven. Remove from paper and press stems into bottom of rounds to resemble mushrooms. 1 cup almond paste
This is a decorating recipe rather than a dessert in itself — the meringue mushrooms that finish a bûche de Noël or a chocolate cake. The original assumes you already have a meringue mixture at hand and that you know what a meringue oven means, which in 1907 was a cooler place than the phrase suggests.
- Ignore "moderate oven" hereA moderate oven is conventionally reckoned at roughly 350F, which will brown and crack meringue before it dries. Meringue mushrooms want 200-225F for 1 to 1.5 hours, then the oven turned off and the door left ajar until cool. The goal is drying, not baking.
- The meringue itselfNo mixture is given. Two egg whites beaten to soft peaks with 1/2 cup granulated sugar added a spoonful at a time, beaten until the sugar is fully dissolved and the meringue holds a stiff, glossy peak, makes roughly two dozen small mushrooms. Undissolved sugar is what causes weeping and beads of syrup.
- Pipe, do not spoon"Drawing mixture upward" describes a pastry bag with a plain round tip: press out a dome for the cap, then for the stems press and lift straight up to draw a tapering cone. A quarter is about 1 inch across, so keep the caps small — large caps crack and slump.
- PaperPeriod recipes mean brown paper or a buttered paper lining. Use parchment; meringue releases from it cleanly once fully dry, and if it sticks it is not dry yet.
- The cocoaDust through a fine sieve or a tea strainer before baking, very lightly. Lowney's would have meant plain unsweetened cocoa powder; period American cocoa was generally natural rather than Dutch-process, though either works here.
- AssemblyA bare stem pressed into a bare cap holds poorly once both are fully dry. Make a small hollow in the underside of each cap with a knife tip or skewer, add a dab of melted chocolate, and set the stem in; let it firm before moving them.
- The stray line"1 cup almond paste" has no role in the meringue and appears to belong to a neighbouring recipe. Do not try to work it in.
- StorageFully dried meringues keep a week or more in an airtight tin at room temperature. Refrigeration and humidity turn them soft and tacky within hours.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate and cocoa manufacturer, and like the Baker's and Hershey's books of the same era it exists partly to sell cocoa hthough a dessert section thick with chocolate work and small decorative flourishes. Meringue mushrooms are a French pastry conceit, generally traced to the champignons that garnish a bûche de Noël, where the log-and-mushroom conceit turns a rolled cake into a piece of woodland scenery. Their appearance in an American commercial cookbook is itself notable, and the recipe's brevity is telling: the compiler expected a reader who already made meringue regularly and needed only the shaping trick.