Home › Recipes › Eclipse Meringue
Eclipse Meringue
1 quart of grated or minced pineapple, 1 small cupful of port wine. 1/2 pound of sugar. 2 ounces of corn starch. 4 ounces of butter. 1 lemon rind grated. 8 yolks of eggs. 1/2 pound of shred pistachio nuts.
Stew the minced pineapple and wine and half the sugar together, till somewhat reduced and like fruit butter. Mix the starch and the rest of the sugar together, stir them and the butter into the pineapple add flavoring and yolks of eggs. Bake this cream on bottom sheets of white cake. Meringue over as usual. Sift sugar on top before baking and strew over the shred pistachio nuts. Dry bake to a fawn color with the oven door open. When these meringue puddings are to be set on the table whole, to be eaten cold the method has to be varied a little, by baking on jelly-cake pans with a stout paper hoop pinned or pasted around. Butter the paper well, make the meringue in it instead of in a pan, then remove it carefully when the meringue is placed on its stand, being slipped from the jelly-cake flet by means of a palette knife. In these cases the meringue can be placed in pyramidal form through a large tube or cornet forming dome shapes on top, etc., etc. Here is one more for variety:
This is a bakery formula rather than a home recipe: it assumes you already know how to build a meringue and it gives weights, not cups. The hinge is the low, slack oven — the meringue is dried rather than browned, and the yolk-and-pineapple cream beneath it must set without curdling.
- "Dry bake with the oven door open"That means a cool oven with the door propped so moisture escapes; the recipe gives no temperature, and a modern equivalent would fall somewhere around 250-275F. "Fawn color" is a pale tan, barely past ivory. In a hot oven the meringue is liable to crack and weep and the yolk cream to curdle.
- Weights to volumes1/2 lb sugar is about 1 1/8 cups granulated; 2 oz cornstarch is a scant 1/2 cup; 4 oz butter is one stick; 1/2 lb shelled pistachios is roughly 1 3/4 cups before shredding. The "small cupful" of port is ambiguous in period usage — treat it as about 6 fl oz.
- The meringue itself"Meringue over as usual" leaves the quantities to the cook; a common working ratio is about 2 tablespoons sugar per egg white. The eight whites left from the yolks would be the obvious thing to use, though the recipe does not say so.
- PineappleA quart of grated fresh pineapple is one to two large fruits. Canned crushed pineapple works, drained, but reduce it further since it carries more syrup. The stewing step concentrates the fruit, and it also destroys the bromelain in raw pineapple, which attacks egg protein.
- "Bottom sheets of white cake"A thin layer of plain white (egg-white) cake baked in a sheet or jelly-cake pan, cut to size, used as a base to absorb moisture from the cream. A thin sponge or a split layer cake serves the same purpose.
- "Jelly-cake flet"Almost certainly a compositor's error for the flat sheet or plaque the meringue is built on. The technique is simply to build inside a buttered paper collar, then slide the finished dessert free with a long offset spatula.
- Order of workTemper carefully: the pineapple mixture should be off the boil before the yolks go in, or you will have sweet scrambled egg. The cream is then spread raw on the cake and set in the oven under the meringue.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield or pan size. The varied version, set on the table whole, is specified to be eaten cold, and the pistachios are strewn on before baking, so they may colour lightly in the drying oven.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for the trade — hotel and restaurant pastry departments in Chicago and the Midwest in the 1880s and 90s — and this recipe shows it, from the weights in ounces to the paper hoop pinned around a jelly-cake pan and the closing "here is one more for variety," which tells you it sits in a run of interchangeable meringue puddings. Names like "Eclipse" were menu currency rather than descriptions of anything: a pastry cook needed a dozen distinct-sounding desserts built from the same yolk cream and whipped whites, and the eclipse here is presumably the fawn dome of meringue over a hidden interior. The combination of pineapple, port and pistachio marks it as an expensive plate for its moment: a quart of grated fruit and half a pound of shelled pistachios represented real cost, and the pistachios in particular were an imported luxury.