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Strawberry Floating Island
Make the same as Floating Island and add to the meringue the sweetened juice of two cups of strawberries.
A one-line variation that assumes you have the book's Floating Island in front of you: a stirred custard with beaten whites on top. Everything tricky here is in the fruit juice.
- The hinge: liquid kills meringueThe hinge: liquid slackens meringue -- Sweetened strawberry juice is mostly water and sugar syrup, and adding much thin liquid to beaten whites will slacken or deflate them. The safe course is to cook the juice down to a few tablespoons of thick syrup, cool it completely, and beat it in a spoonful at a time after the whites are already stiff.
- "The juice of two cups of strawberries"This means juice extracted from two cups of berries, not two cups of juice. Hull, mash, toss with a few tablespoons of sugar, let stand 30 minutes, then strain and press — expect roughly a third to half a cup of liquid before reducing.
- The custard underneathFloating Island in books of this period is usually a stirred (soft) custard: milk, egg yolks, sugar, cooked in a double boiler until it coats the spoon, roughly 175-180F. It will curdle not far above that, though sugar raises the point somewhat, so pull it off the heat early and strain it.
- Raw whitesIf the meringue is spooned on unbaked, it is uncooked egg white. Use pasteurized whites, or poach spoonfuls in barely simmering milk for a minute a side and lift them onto the custard; briefly browning the peaks in a 350F oven colors them but will not necessarily heat the interior to a safe temperature.
- Sugar in the whitesThe juice already carries sugar, so cut back whatever the base recipe calls for in the meringue or the whole thing turns cloying and weepy. Superfine sugar dissolves better and helps the foam hold.
- Weeping and timingMeringue with fruit juice beaten in weeps sooner than plain meringue, chiefly because of the added liquid and sugar. Assemble within an hour of serving and keep it cold; overnight it will sit in a pink puddle.
Floating island is often linked to the French ile flottante, and it has a close cousin in oeufs a la neige, snow eggs; the English dish appears in cookbooks from the eighteenth century and stayed on dessert lists for two hundred years, a persistence sometimes attributed to the way it used up the whites left from a yolk-rich custard. That thrift is the whole logic of the dish: one bowl of eggs, separated, becomes both layers. The strawberry version here belongs to the American turn-of-the-century habit of tinting and flavoring standard puddings with fresh fruit juice in season, and it appears in Lowney's Cook Book (published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate maker, in the early 1900s) among a long run of custards and creams — the sort of general dessert chapter a candy company's cookbook carried alongside its chocolate recipes to make itself useful year-round.