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Meringue Puffs--An Easier Way
1 pound of granulated sugar. 8 whites of eggs. Flavoring extract. 3 drops of acetic acid, or a pinch of tartaric. or a little lemon juice. Put half the whites in a bowl without beating, and all the sugar with them and beat together with a wooden spoon or paddle. It may save half the labor and insures success to have all the utensils and ingredients quite cold to begin with. It quickens the process if the beating can be done with two paddles, using both hands as regular workmen do. The bowl should be a deep one holding two quarts.
The sugar and egg at first are as stiff as dough. Beat rapidly and constantly for about 15 minutes, when it should be white and rather firm cake icing. Now add the remaining 4 whites of egg, one at a time, and beat a few minutes between each one, but before the last one is added put in the acid and the flavoring.
The whole time of beating is about 25 minutes. An essential point is to beat the icing after the addition of each white until it will again draw up in peaks after the paddle is lifted from it, except the last white which should not be beaten much as it forms the gloss and smoothness on the meringues when they are baked.
Drop this meringue paste in egg shapes on baking pans instead of on paper as in the last receipt, and these being made with granulated sugar instead of powdered do not need any sugar sifted over, they look better without. Bake in a very slow oven till pale straw color and dry. They slip from the pans easily when cold.
Cut out the thin bottom crusts with a penknife, and fill the meringues with whipped cream sweet, ened and flavored, or with wine jelly, and either place two together by the bottoms or join them two together side by side with melted candy or icing, like an open walnut shell, and pile wipped cream or chopped jelly upon them. These meringues likewise look well singly as cups filled with bright jellies of different colors and with ice creams. Instead of placing the meringue paste on the pans with spoon and knife it is much better to use the sack and tube, such as lady-fingers are made with--a funnel shaped canvas bag with a tin tube in the pointed end, the tube about 1/2 inch in diameter at the narrow end for these. Fill the sack with the paste and press it out in the size and shape desired. Rose Meringue Puffs. Having made the meringue raste according to the preceding directions, color it, or a part of it, of a delicate pink and flavor with rose extract. Drop with the sack and tube pieces like large marbles on baking pans previously greased and then wiped dry, and bake slowly without color. These rise rounded and nearly hollow and have a gauzy appearance when rightly baked. Sometimes the first panful of any of these varieties put into the range will run together and melt and come out worthless, and the next come out perfect meringues, or one side of a pan will be spoiled and the remainder good. This shows that the baking is the critical part of the making, and that is what we never can teach by word of mouth. At a certain gentle heat the egg in the meringues cooks and dries in shape, but at a higher degree the sugar melts and runs to candy in bubbles. At an insufficient degree of heat the meringue dries as it would in the sun and does not swell and change its appearance. In the brick oven after the bread has been withdrawn is the proper place to bake meringues.
An unheated, unwhipped-first meringue: sugar goes into raw whites at the start and the whole thing is worked into a stiff icing before the remaining whites loosen it. A stand mixer collapses the labor, but the baking is still the part that decides everything.
- The hinge is oven temperatureThe hinge is oven temperature. "A very slow oven" in period usage is generally read as somewhere in the region of 200-250°F, and the author is right that a small difference decides between a dry shell and a puddle of caramel: too hot and the sugar softens and weeps before the egg protein sets; too cool and the shells merely dehydrate without rising, as the author himself describes.
- Weights and yieldOne pound of granulated sugar is about 2¼ cups; 8 large whites are roughly 8 oz by weight, so the ratio is about 2 parts sugar to 1 part white, at the upper end of hard-meringue practice, which is why the mixture starts "as stiff as dough." The recipe gives no yield; a batch this size makes several dozen egg-shaped shells, or roughly twice that many marble-sized rose puffs.
- Baking and drying timeThe recipe gives none, only "bake in a very slow oven till pale straw color and dry." At so low a heat that means a long stretch, upwards of an hour, with further drying as the oven falls. The brick oven cooling after bread is exactly this: gentle falling heat over a long stretch.
- The acidThe recipe offers three drops of acetic acid, a pinch of tartaric acid, or a little lemon juice as interchangeable. Acetic acid was sold concentrated, so three drops is not equivalent to three drops of vinegar; note also that the powdered alternative given is tartaric acid, not cream of tartar. A trace of acid helps stabilise the foam and discourages crystallisation. The recipe adds it just before the last white.
- Cold utensils, and whyThe instruction to have all utensils and ingredients quite cold cuts against the usual modern preference for room-temperature whites. The author's own justification is that it "may save half the labor and insures success." A bowl scrupulously free of fat matters in any case.
- The last whiteThe recipe is explicit that the final white "should not be beaten much as it forms the gloss and smoothness on the meringues when they are baked," whereas every earlier white is beaten until the mass draws up in peaks again after the paddle is lifted.
- Pans, not paperThese go straight onto baking pans rather than the paper used in the preceding receipt, and the author says they slip from the pans easily when cold. The granulated sugar is credited only with making a dusting of sugar over the top unnecessary. Parchment is a modern alternative.
- HumidityNothing in the original mentions it, but meringue is hygroscopic. On a damp day the shells will soften within an hour of leaving the oven; fill them just before serving and store the empties airtight, never in the refrigerator.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late-nineteenth-century trade manuals written for hotel and restaurant kitchens rather than households, which is why the instructions assume a two-quart bowl, a canvas piping sack, and a workman beating with both hands. The word meringue is often traced to the Swiss town of Meiringen, a tradition rather than a documented fact; what is documented is that sugar-and-white confections of this kind were standard European pastry work by the eighteenth century. The author's frank admission that a panful may melt while the next comes out perfect, and that baking "is what we never can teach by word of mouth," is a reminder of what cooking in a wood-fired brick oven actually demanded: the pastry cook read residual heat by feel, and meringues were slotted in after the bread came out precisely because that dying warmth was gentle enough for them.