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Natchez Meringue
To ornament the top of this, candied and sugared orange peel should be prepared, or green citrou, or preserved water melon-<??>rind. The orange peel first cut into the smallest possible squares is stewed in plenty of water to extract the bitter taste, then stewed in white syrup, then partly dried and rolled in granulated sugar to separate the pieces. Strew this candied peel over the top of meringue after it has become firm without removing it from the oven.
The orange cream. 3 oranges. 1 lemon. 1/2 pound of sugar. 2 1/2 pints of water (5 cups). 3 ounces of corn starch. 1 ounce of butter. 10 yolks of eggs Grate the rinds and squeeze the juice of oranges and lemon into the water, then bring it to a boil, add the starch and sugar and finish as directed for other kinds.
My meal-colored elf, who still is sitting on the dough-trough as before, and converses so well, in a rich Hartz Mountain dialect, would be a delightful companion to wile away a witching midnight hour or two if he were not such an idol breaker. Native of Santa Claus land as he is it would be glorious to sit in the stilly night, when stars are in the quiet skies and the cricket chirrups on the hearth, and hear him tell the weird wild stories of the Black Forest, or the strange but mellowed legends, half told half hinted in the Pilgrims of the Rhine. But his realism is chilling in the extreme and he has no feeling of compunction: "Mephistopheles?" "No, not numerous. Never but one man really saw Mephistopheles, that was Gurthe."
Then I suppose Gurthe is Goethe, and wonder where Sir Walter Scott found the name Gurth for his Saxon swineherd. But, says he, there was no Gurth, no Wamba, no Ivanhoe, and Friar Tuck never had a venison pasty! "But the Hartz Mountains--are they not full of the supernatural?" "Nein. They are full of charcoal-burners, glass-blowers, miners, and people who make childrens' toys." "No headless horesmen who ride past you at night! No white lady of the what's its name mountain pass? No demons that come and tempt wood-choppers to do something? No haunted hotels in the Black Forest? No safes, no annunciators, no elevators?" "Nein" "No phantom herds of deer that vanish into the ground just as the guests on a hunt are about to come up with them? No Metheglin? No were-wolves, no vampires, no dampfnudeln?" "O, yes, there are German dumplings." "Real and sure?" "O, Yes; they are real enough." "'Tis well for the hungry boy who shouts with his sister at play; and well for the sailor lad who sings in his boat on the bay; that this much is solid in Fatherland, and cannot be reasoned away"'.
Two components sit in this entry: a candied-peel garnish and an orange cream filling for a meringue-topped pie or pudding. The meringue itself, and the phrase "finish as directed for other kinds," both point back to earlier pages of the book, so a little reconstruction is needed.
- The hinge: temper the yolksThe pages this refers back to are not reproduced here, but "finish as directed for other kinds" most likely means the boiled, thickened, sweetened juice is stirred a little at a time into the beaten yolks, then returned to the pan and cooked briefly until it thickens further, off a hard boil. Ten yolks dropped straight into boiling starch will scramble.
- Weights, not volumesOunces here are by weight. Half a pound of sugar is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons; 3 ounces of cornstarch is roughly 2/3 cup; 1 ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons. The 2 1/2 pints is helpfully glossed as 5 cups.
- "Green citrou"Most likely a typesetting slip for green citron, candied citron peel, still sold in the baking aisle around the holidays. Preserved watermelon rind, the other alternative the recipe offers, is a Southern sweetmeat of the same kind.
- Why the peel is boiled firstOrange peel carries bitter compounds in the white pith. Stewing in plenty of water, drained and repeated if the peel is thick-skinned, pulls them out before the syrup goes in; skip it and the garnish turns acrid.
- White syrupA plain sugar-and-water syrup with no molasses or caramel color. The peel simmers in it, then is partly dried before being tossed in granulated sugar.
- Setting the meringueThe candied peel goes on after the meringue has firmed but while it is still in the oven, so it beds into the surface.
- Strain the baseGrated rind boiled into the liquid leaves specks and fiber, and straining the thickened cream will give a smoother, paler filling.
- YieldFive cups of liquid plus ten yolks makes a large quantity of filling, enough for something on the order of two 9-inch pies or one large shallow dish.
The American Pastry Cook was the work of Jessup Whitehead, a Chicago hotel cook and trade journalist who wrote for professional kitchens in the 1880s and 90s, and its recipes carry the scale and shorthand of a hotel bakeshop — cross-references to "other kinds," weights in ounces, quantities in pints. The name attaches the dish to Natchez, Mississippi, a wealthy river town, though the book gives no reason for the association; preserved watermelon rind, offered here as an alternative garnish, was a Southern sweetmeat put up in summer. The long digression about the "meal-colored elf" on the dough-trough is not an error of transcription: Whitehead threaded comic dialogues and essays between his formulas, which is part of why the book reads less like a manual than a working cook's commonplace book.