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Marguerites
32 LONG BRANCH SALT WAFERS I CUP SUGAR WHITES OF 2 EGGS 72 1% 1/2 CUP CURRANTS 1/2 CUP WALNUTS Beat whites of eggs until stiff. Add sugar. Spread lightly on wafers, sprinkle with currants and walnuts and bake slowly in reflector oven.
A meringue spread on salted crackers and baked until set — the standard camp version of a confection that appeared under this name in dozens of early twentieth-century books. The whole trick is low heat and patience.
- "Bake slowly"The recipe gives no temperature, and a reflector oven has no dial. In a modern oven a slow oven is usually read as somewhere around 300F; go by appearance rather than the clock, until the meringue is dry and only faintly coloured. Too hot and the sugar browns before the interior sets.
- Reflector ovenA reflector oven is an open-fronted metal box set beside the fire, with angled sheets bouncing radiant heat onto a shelf. Heat comes from one side only, so the pan is turned end to end partway through. A conventional oven or a covered grill at the same temperature does the same job.
- Long Branch salt wafersA period brand of thin, lightly salted cracker, not sold today. Any plain saltine or water biscuit works; the salt plays against the sweetness of the meringue.
- Egg whites and sugarTwo whites will not carry a full cup of sugar as a stable meringue in modern practice. Beat the whites to stiff peaks first, then add the sugar a spoonful at a time and keep beating until the mixture is glossy and no longer feels gritty between the fingers.
- Spread lightlyA thin layer, roughly a teaspoon per wafer, mounded slightly at the centre. Piled on thickly it will slump off the edges and scorch on the pan.
- CurrantsDried currants, the small black Zante raisins, not fresh red or black currants. Chop the walnuts fine so they sit in the meringue rather than on top of it, where they burn first.
- YieldThe leading "32" appears to give the number of wafers, though the transcription is damaged at that point. They keep a day or two in a tin but go soft in humid air, so they are best eaten the day they are made.
Marguerites turn up in American cookery from around 1900 into the 1930s, usually as a way of turning a box of crackers and two leftover egg whites into something that reads as a sweet. The name is the French for daisy, generally taken as a reference to the pale meringue cap. The recipe suits camp cooking because crackers, sugar, dried fruit and nuts all travel well, and eggs are the only perishable involved. The reflector oven, a folding sheet-metal box that could be flattened for carrying, was one of the things that made baking possible at a campsite.