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Gipsy Meringue
The same in the main as the two preceding with a chocolate cream for the middle. 3 pints of milk. 4 ounces of sugar. 3 ounces of grated chocolate. 3 ounces of corn starch. 8 yolks of eggs. Vanilla flavoring. Little salt. Make same way as almond cream, boiling the grated chocolate in the milk. Make the meringue white and very light baked; flavor it with almond and sift crimson sugar sand on top after baking.
The object of baking the sheets of cake in the pans in which the meringue is made is to have them adhere to the bottom sufficiently to prevent their rising and floating in the cream mixture when poured in as otherwise they will do. Jelly cake sheets used this way have to be held to the bottom by means of a little beaten egg, baked by passing the pan a moment over the fire.
This is the third in a run of related meringue desserts, so the original assumes you have read the almond cream version above it. What it amounts to is a chocolate cornstarch pastry cream poured over cake sheets baked into the pan, then topped with a slow-dried meringue.
- The hinge: anchor the cakeEverything else in the recipe is routine; the one instruction that actually decides success is keeping the cake layers from floating. Bake the sheets directly in the pans so they stick, or brush a jelly-cake sheet with beaten egg and set it by holding the pan over a burner for a few seconds before the cream goes in.
- Measures3 pints is 6 cups of milk. The dry weights are real weights, not volumes: 4 oz sugar is about 1/2 cup, 3 oz cornstarch about 3/4 cup, 3 oz grated chocolate roughly 3/4 cup loosely packed.
- Grated chocolateIn a trade book of this period this would most likely have meant a hard block chocolate, unsweetened or barely sweetened, grated to dissolve in milk. Unsweetened baking chocolate or 100% cacao, finely chopped, is the safest modern stand-in; a sweetened bar will shift the sugar balance.
- Sweetness4 oz of sugar in 6 cups of milk is restrained by current standards, and the finished dish also carries a sweet meringue and sanded sugar on top. Taste the cream before it sets and adjust if it is going to be eaten on its own terms.
- Building the creamSlake the cornstarch in cold milk, boil the chocolate into the rest, then temper the yolks with hot milk before returning everything to the pot. Cook it to a full boil and keep whisking for a minute or two after it thickens, or the starch tastes raw and the custard slackens as it cools.
- "White and very light baked"A pale, dried meringue rather than a browned one. The book gives no temperature; in a modern oven that means the lowest setting you have, with the door cracked so steam escapes, baked long and slow. Watch it and pull it before it takes any colour, since colour is what the recipe is trying to avoid.
- FlavoringVanilla in the cream, almond in the meringue, as the recipe divides them. Almond flavoring of this period was generally a bitter-almond essence, for which modern almond extract is the usual substitute; a few drops is enough for this quantity of whites.
- Crimson sugar sandCoarse colored sanding sugar, tinted red. Period kitchens used cochineal; ordinary red sanding sugar or coarse sugar tossed with a drop of food coloring and dried does the same job. Sift it on after baking, as the recipe says, since it will bleed on a wet meringue in the oven.
- YieldSix cups of milk makes a great deal of cream, in line with the trade scale of this book. The recipe gives no pan size or number of servings; halve it for home use.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late nineteenth-century trade manuals written for hotel and restaurant bakers rather than housekeepers, which is why the recipe is terse, keyed to the two recipes preceding it, and scaled well beyond household quantities. The book does not explain the name "Gipsy," and no documented origin for it can be given here. The technical detail is worth noting as period evidence: chocolate arrived in the bakeshop as a hard block to be grated and boiled into milk, cornstarch was by this date a common thickener for pastry cream, and red colouring for finishing sugar commonly came from cochineal. The instruction about baking cake sheets into the pan so they will not float is the sort of hard-won shop knowledge these books existed to pass along.