Meringues
Whites of 3 eggs 1 cup powdered sugar 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Beat the eggs to a stiff froth; stir in the powdered sugar lightly with a wooden spoon. When thoroughly mixed flavor and arrange the meringue on buttered paper in the shape of eggs; sift powdered sugar thickly over the top; let them stand a few minutes; shake off the superfluous sugar; lay the paper on tins Planned for : and bake in a very slow oven until a delicate brown. When cool, remove carefully from the paper; dip a spoon in hot water; scoop out the inside; dust with powdered sugar and set away until serving time. Fill with ice cream or whipped cream and press together, leaving some of the cream visible.
A plain hard meringue shell, hollowed and filled — the ancestor of the meringue nest. The recipe is sound; only the oven language and the sugar need translating.
- "A very slow oven"200–250°F, which is drying rather than baking. Two hours or more is normal, and the door can be propped slightly with a wooden spoon to let moisture escape.
- "Delicate brown" is optionalModern practice keeps meringues pale ivory. Bake until the meringues lift cleanly from the paper and sound hollow when tapped.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this period the term usually means granulated sugar ground fine — closer to today's caster or superfine sugar than to confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Caster sugar gives the crispest result; a food processor will make it from granulated in under a minute.
- Sugar ratioOne cup to three whites is about 200 g to 90 g, a touch over the classic 2:1 by weight. That is right for a shell meant to hold its shape and be hollowed out.
- Buttered paperUse parchment, unbuttered; it releases cleanly on its own.
- No trace of fat or yolkThe hinge of the whole recipe. A speck of yolk or a film of grease in the bowl will keep the whites from reaching stiff peaks. Glass or metal, not plastic.
- Fold, do not beatThe instruction to stir in the sugar "lightly with a wooden spoon" means fold. Beating the sugar in deflates the foam and gives a flat, dense shell. A silicone spatula does the job better than a spoon.
- Cooling and the second dustingLeave them in the turned-off oven to cool completely before hollowing; a warm shell will crack under the spoon. Store the empty shells airtight — humidity softens them within hours.
- Yield and servingThree whites make roughly ten to twelve egg-shaped shells, so five or six filled pairs. Fill only at the moment of serving, or the cream will dissolve the interior.
Meringue as a technique — egg whites whipped with sugar and dried in a cooling bread oven — appears in English and French recipe books from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onward, and the name is variously traced, in traditional accounts, to the Swiss town of Meiringen or to a pastry cook named Gasparini; neither claim is documented. Cheap refined sugar and the wire whisk, both of which spread through ordinary kitchens over the course of the nineteenth century, made the meringue easier to attempt, and by the time of Mrs. Fryer's book the shell filled with ice cream was a familiar American dessert. The stray line "Planned for :" appears to belong to the book's format rather than the recipe: the book was issued as loose leaves, with a blank on the page for the cook to note the meal it was meant for.