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Meringue Cakes in General
Make white icing or meringue paste according to directions in preceding articles and add two more whites to thin it. Color some of it and leave some white. Spread it over sheets of any sort of cake, or on small cakes and bake in a very slack oven with something under the cakes to keep them from too much baking at bottom. Granulated sugar may be sifted over the top before baking, or colored sugar sand on the white.
This is a bakeshop method rather than a formula: a meringue or royal-icing topping thinned enough to spread, then set in a barely warm oven. Almost everything depends on the oven being cool enough to dry the topping rather than bake it.
- "A very slack oven"Slack meant the lowest working heat of the range; period usage is usually put somewhere around 250-300F, though this book gives no figures. The aim is for the meringue to dry and firm without taking much color, so a hotter oven risks browning and cracking the surface and overbaking the cake beneath.
- The double pan"Something under the cakes" most likely means a second pan set beneath the first, or a layer of paper or similar insulation; the text does not say which. Doubling a sheet, or setting the pan on an inverted one, insulates the base from direct bottom heat.
- The base icing is not given hereThe recipe depends on the meringue paste from the preceding pages. In practice this is either a royal icing (whites beaten with sifted confectioners' sugar to a stiff, spreadable paste) or a whipped meringue with granulated sugar. Either will take the two extra whites.
- "Two more whites" is relativeThe quantity only makes sense against the batch size in the original earlier article, which is not on this page. Thin by adding white a half at a time until the icing falls from the spatula in a thick ribbon and can be spread without tearing the cake surface.
- ColoringNineteenth-century bakeshops used cochineal, saffron and vegetable extracts. Modern gel colors are far stronger; add them with a toothpick, since liquid color will slacken an icing that has already been thinned with egg white.
- Colored sugar sandCoarse sanding sugar, tinted. It is scattered over the white icing before baking so it sets into the surface. Fine granulated sugar dissolves and gives a glassy crust instead of visible grains.
- DonenessThe top should be dry and firm to a light touch, with no tackiness at the edges. No time is given in the original and it will depend entirely on the oven, so check often. Cooling in the turned-off oven with the door ajar helps keep the meringue from cracking.
- StorageMeringue tops soften in a covered container. Hold them uncovered at room temperature and cut with a knife dipped in hot water and wiped between slices.
Jessup Whitehead's trade manuals were written for men working hotel and restaurant bakeshops in the late nineteenth century, and this entry reads exactly like shop practice: no yield, no pan size, just the adjustment that makes a stiff icing spreadable and the trick that keeps the bottoms from scorching. Meringue-topped sheet cakes were one way to turn plain cake into something that looked decorated, and colored sanding sugar did work that piped ornament would have cost time to do. The tinted "sugar sand" of the period was colored with cochineal for pink and red, and other shades are said to have come from vegetable and mineral preparations, some of which were later restricted; commercial sanding sugar today is made with approved food colors. The vagueness of the instruction is not carelessness but the assumption that the reader already had the house meringue formula in hand from the preceding pages.