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Princess Meringue
Make and bake the cake sheets in the pans, same as for the lemon cream meringue preceding, then make the almond as follows: 3 pints of milk. 4 ounces of sugar. 3 ounces of corn starch. 1/2 pound of almonds. 1 ounce of butter. 8 whites of eggs. Flavoring of rose. Pinch of salt.
Scald the almonds, peel, mince and then pound them to a rough paste. Boil the milk, mix the starch and sugar together dry, stir rap idly into the milk, take off, and add the other ingredients, the whites not beaten, except in the mixture, and the almonds and rose extract last.
Bake this white cream on the cakes as before. Make the meringue a rose-pink color, flavor with vanilla and rose, and sift granulated sugar on top before baking. Serve with a port wine and lemon sauce.
A hotel-scale sheet dessert: a baked cake base, a thick almond cornstarch cream poured over it, and a tinted meringue browned on top. The quantities are trade quantities, and the recipe assumes you have just read the lemon cream meringue that precedes it.
- It depends on the preceding recipeThe cake sheets, the pans and the phrase "bake this white cream on the cakes as before" all point back to the lemon cream meringue entry. Without that page you are working from a fragment; find it before starting, or substitute a plain sponge sheet baked in a rimmed pan.
- Scale it downThree pints of milk is 6 cups, and with a half pound of almonds and eight whites this fills large bakery sheets. A third of the recipe (1 pint milk, 1 oz cornstarch, 2-1/2 oz almonds, 3 whites) suits one 9x13 pan and serves about 12.
- Weights, not cupsThe dry goods are by weight: 3 oz cornstarch is roughly 3/4 cup, 4 oz sugar a scant 2/3 cup, 8 oz almonds about 1-1/2 cups whole. Cornstarch is light and cups will mislead you; use a scale.
- The hinge: unbeaten whites"The whites not beaten, except in the mixture" is the whole method. The whites go into the hot cornstarch cream raw and unwhipped and are cooked by the residual heat plus the oven, which gives a dense sliceable custard rather than a foam. Take the pan off the heat before they go in or they will scramble in threads.
- Scalding the almondsPouring boiling water over almonds loosens the skins so they slip off; that is all "scald and peel" means. Blanched almonds from a bag save the step. "Pound to a rough paste" is a coarse, slightly gritty texture, not marzipan smoothness, so pulse in a processor rather than run it.
- Rose flavouringPeriod "flavoring of rose" is rose water or a rose extract far weaker than modern food-grade rose oil. Start with a teaspoon of rose water per pint of milk and taste; a drop too much and the dessert tastes of soap.
- The pink colourA rose-pink meringue in the 1890s was tinted with cochineal or a prepared carmine. Any modern liquid or gel colour does the job, added at the soft-peak stage so it disperses without deflating the whites.
- OvenNo temperature is given because the original cook knew the house oven. Set the cream at a moderate 350F until it no longer wobbles at the centre, then apply the meringue and return it just long enough to colour, five to eight minutes. Sifted granulated sugar on top gives the crisp crackled crust the recipe is after.
- The sauceNo formula is offered for the port and lemon sauce. A sauce under that name would usually be along the lines of a sugar syrup thinned with port and sharpened with lemon, served warm alongside, but the recipe gives no detail; use a current sauce recipe if you want measured amounts.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late nineteenth-century trade manuals written for hotel, restaurant and steamboat bakeshops rather than for households, and the tell is right here in the quantities: milk by the three pints, almonds by the half pound, whites by the eight. It is the work of the Chicago writer Jessup Whitehead, whose kitchen manuals circulated widely among American commercial cooks. "Princess" was one of a family of flattering menu names, alongside Victoria, Imperial and Duchess, hung on desserts dressed up with almonds, meringue or a wine sauce, and it carried no fixed formula. The pairing of almond and rose water, on the other hand, is genuinely old, running back through European and earlier Middle Eastern confectionery, and it survived in American baking well past 1900, though vanilla gradually became the more common pastry flavouring.