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Realengo
3/4 cup fresh fruit Whites of 3 eggs Sugar Whipped cream Press the fruit through a sieve; heat and sweeten; add this to the well-beaten whites, beating continually. Turn into a buttered mold and bake in a slow oven until firm. Remove; cover the top with whipped cream sweetened and flavored to taste; decorate with preserved cherries or citron. This is a favorite Mexican dessert.
A baked fruit meringue with no quantities given for the sugar and no time on the oven, which is typical of the period but leaves two decisions to the cook. The hinge is heat control: this is a meringue, and a slow oven is not a suggestion.
- Slow oven means 300FSlow oven means roughly 250-300F -- Period usage puts a slow oven in that range; 300F is a safe upper limit. Above that the whites puff hard, weep syrup and then collapse as they cool. Firm to a light touch in the centre is the test, likely somewhere around 30 to 40 minutes for a small mold.
- Use a water bathThe recipe gives no oven time and relies on gentle heat. In a modern oven, stand the buttered mold in a pan of hot water reaching halfway up the sides; it keeps the edges from setting into rubber before the middle cooks.
- Sugar is unmeasuredNo quantity is given anywhere in the recipe. For three whites and 3/4 cup of fruit purée, 1/3 to 1/2 cup of sugar in the fruit is a reasonable starting point, adjusted to how tart the fruit is.
- Hot purée into the whitesHot purée into the whites -- Heating and sweetening the fruit before beating it into the whites partially sets them, on the same principle as an Italian meringue. Add it in a thin stream while beating hard, or the whites will lose much of their volume.
- Which fruitStrawberries, raspberries, apricots and guava all work; the sieve is there to remove seeds and skin. Very juicy purées should be reduced on the stove first, or the meringue will not set.
- CitronCandied citron peel, not the fresh fruit and not lemon. Sold in tubs at holiday time; chopped candied orange peel is the nearest everyday substitute.
- UnmoldingLet it settle a few minutes, then run a thin knife round the edge. It is fragile and will sag slightly on the plate, which is why the whipped cream goes on top.
- YieldThree whites and 3/4 cup of fruit makes a modest dessert for four, or two generous portions. Scale up rather than stretch it.
Realengo is Spanish for something belonging to the crown em>tierra realenga was royal land, unassigned to any grant. Mrs. Fryer's book, published in Philadelphia and generally dated to the late 1910s, belongs to a generation of American loose-leaf cookbooks that collected "foreign" dishes for middle-class hostesses, and the flat label "a favorite Mexican dessert" is doing the work that a paragraph of provenance would do now. Whether any Mexican cook would have recognised the name in this form is unclear; what the recipe does record accurately is the older logic of a kitchen where three spare egg whites were an ingredient worth building a dish around.