Home › Recipes › Meringue Surprises
Meringue Surprises
They are shallow pastry tarts containing half a peach or apricot and built up high with meringue, then, instead of being baked, are coated with hot fondant. The surprise consists in finding a fruit tart inside of what appears to be but a kiss meringue. Bake tarts in shallow patty pans. Cover with meringue by means of a bag and tube, laying the meringue around the edge first and then another ring and another cone-shape until it ends in a tall point at the top. Run hot fondant all over it by means of a funnel with a handle, made for the purpose. When cold and dry remove the "surprises" with a knife from the marble slab on which the coating has been done, and the surplus drippings of sugar can be scraped up and saved.
The construction is sound confectioner's work, but the hinge of the recipe is that the meringue is never baked. That single omission is what puts it out of reach today.
- Why it failsThe meringue is piped raw and sealed under fondant; nothing in the process brings the egg white to a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Hot fondant runs at roughly 100-110F when poured for coating, well below any pasteurising range, and it touches only the outer surface. The interior of a tall meringue cone stays raw indefinitely.
- The seal makes it worseA fondant shell tends to keep the meringue soft rather than drying it out, and the pieces are simply left at room temperature until "cold and dry" before being lifted off the slab. That is an uncooked egg-white preparation sitting out for hours behind a sugar coating. Use a current recipe built on cooked or pasteurised whites if you want this effect.
- Patty pansShallow pressed-tin tartlet moulds, roughly 2 to 2.5 inches across and under an inch deep. Modern shallow tartlet tins or a mini muffin tin of similar depth correspond; the recipe says only to bake the tarts in them, and does not make clear whether the fruit half goes in before or after baking.
- FondantPoured fondant, not the rolled sugar paste sold under that name now. It is a cooked sugar syrup crystallised to an opaque paste, then rewarmed over water to pouring consistency. Overheating past about 110F dulls the finish and it sets streaked.
- The funnel with a handleA confectioner's dropping funnel: a metal cone with a stick that plugs the spout, letting the worker start and stop the flow one-handed. A ladle and a steady pour do the same job, though with more waste.
- The marble slabMarble is used because it draws heat out of the fondant quickly and releases the set drips cleanly. The recipe says the surplus can be scraped up and saved, presumably to be rewarmed and used again.
- FruitThe recipe says only half a peach or apricot. A poached or preserved half, well drained, works best; very juicy raw fruit weeps into the pastry and can lift the fondant.
- YieldNot given. One tart per person; the recipe has the meringue built up in rings to a tall point, so each is a full portion.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to a run of trade manuals written for hotel and restaurant bakeshops around the turn of the twentieth century, where a pastry chef was expected to send out a changing daily list and needed dozens of small variations on a few base preparations. The surprise here is a confectioner's conceit of the period: what looks like a plain kiss -- a small dry baked meringue then sold by the tray in bakeries -- turns out to have a fruit tart under it. Poured fondant was a staple finish of that era's bakeshop, used on everything from petits fours to eclairs, and the instruction to scrape the slab and save the drippings reads like the voice of a working kitchen counting sugar by the pound. Coating rather than baking may also have solved a practical problem: meringue browns and weeps in the oven over wet fruit, and a fondant jacket gives a clean white finish that holds its shape on a display counter.