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Almond Kisses
1 cup blanched and ground almonds 6 eggs, whites. 1 1/2 cups sugar. Beat eggs very stiff, add sugar, and beat well. Fold in nuts and drop with tube or spoon on linen paper and bake in oven when fire dying out. Pecan kisses made same way, using one tumbler of half meats.
A meringue in the older sense: sweetened whites dried rather than baked, using the falling heat of a wood or coal range after the day's cooking. The whole method hinges on low, patient heat.
- "Oven when fire dying out"This is residual heat, the equivalent of a very slow oven; the recipe gives no temperature and no time. In a modern oven set the lowest temperature available, since a hotter oven will brown and crack the kisses instead of drying them.
- Linen paperA smooth paper laid on the baking sheet. Parchment is the practical equivalent; a silicone mat also works. Waxed paper is a poor substitute in an oven.
- A tumblerA drinking glass, taken as about 8 fluid ounces, so "one tumbler of half meats" is roughly a cup of pecan halves before grinding.
- Sugar into the whitesSix whites will take a cup and a half of sugar, but only if it goes in slowly. Add it a spoonful at a time once the whites hold soft peaks, and beat until the mixture is glossy and no grit remains between your fingers.
- Grinding the almondsGrind in short pulses with a little of the measured sugar. Ground continuously, almonds throw oil, and oil deflates a meringue faster than anything else in the kitchen.
- FoldingFold the nuts in by hand in three additions. Any egg yolk, grease on the bowl, or overworking at this stage will collapse the foam and give you flat, weeping discs.
- Doneness and yieldThe kisses are ready when they lift cleanly from the paper and sound hollow; leave them in the switched-off oven to cool and finish drying. Expect about three to four dozen from this quantity.
- StorageAirtight tin as soon as they are cold. Meringues draw moisture from the air and go leathery within a day in a humid kitchen.
Kisses -- small, crisp, sugared egg-white confections -- were a standard American baking-day economy, made from the whites left over when a cake or custard had used the yolks, and dried in an oven that was cooling anyway. Mrs. Wilson, who is generally identified as a writer for the Ladies' Home Journal and whose book is usually placed in Philadelphia around 1920, was preoccupied with exactly that kind of thrift, and the instruction to bake "when fire dying out" belongs to a range that stayed warm for hours after the last meal. Kisses of this sort were tea-table and afternoon-reception fare, served alongside filled bread rather than in it.