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White Mountain Gems
Make thin sponge drops about the size of the top of a teacup and place spots of meringue paste or icing all around their edge to form a rim or border. The spots should be the size of small cranberries and a high point should be drawn up as the tube leaves them. Bake a few minutes with the oven door open to dry the icing straw color. Fill the centers with a spoonful of wine or lemon jelly so nearly cold as not to run much.
This is an assembly recipe: it assumes you already have sponge batter, a piping bag, and a pan of wine or lemon jelly working. The hinge is the temperature of the jelly when it goes in — too warm and it floods the meringue rim, too cool and it will not level.
- Sponge dropsPiped rounds of plain sponge batter, roughly 2 1/2 to 3 inches across ("the top of a teacup"), baked flat and thin on a lined sheet in a moderate oven; the recipe specifies neither temperature nor time. They should be pale and dry, not browned, since they go back into the oven later.
- Meringue pasteA stiff Swiss or French meringue firm enough to hold a drawn peak — roughly two parts sugar to one part egg white by weight. Royal icing behaves the same way and colors straw more predictably.
- "As the tube leaves them"A pastry tube here is a piping bag with a plain round tip. Press out a bead the size of a small cranberry, stop the pressure, then lift straight up so the meringue pulls into a point.
- Drying the icing straw colorNot a bake so much as a dry-out. The recipe calls for a few minutes with the oven door open so moisture can escape; no temperature is given, so keep the heat low and watch for the faintest ivory tinge rather than working to a clock. Too much heat will color the sugar unevenly and the meringue may weep.
- Wine or lemon jellyA clear gelatin jelly, not a preserve. Modern powdered gelatin at about 1 packet (2 1/4 tsp) per 2 cups liquid gives a soft set; a firm, sliceable jelly takes closer to a packet per cup.
- "So nearly cold as not to run much"Chill the jelly until it is syrupy and just beginning to thicken at the edges of the bowl. Spoon it in, then refrigerate the finished gems to set. Fill no more than an hour or two before serving; the jelly will start to soften the sponge beneath it.
- YieldThe recipe specifies no quantity of batter, so the count depends entirely on the batch you start from. Serve them as a plated dessert component or on a tea tray, one or two per person.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the world of late nineteenth-century American hotel and restaurant kitchens, where a pastry department was expected to turn out dozens of small, showy items each day from a small stock of base preparations — sponge batter, meringue, gelatin jelly — recombined in different shapes. That is exactly what this recipe is: nothing new is made, only assembled. The word gem is doing double duty in period cookbooks; it usually meant a small muffin baked in a cast-iron gem pan, but here it seems most likely to mean a jewel, the point presumably being the clear wine or lemon jelly glittering inside a crown of white peaks. The White Mountains of New Hampshire were a fashionable summer resort in these decades, served by rail and lined with grand hotels, and confectioners' names of the period borrowed freely from such places; the snowy meringue rim is the obvious visual pun, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. Wine jelly — sherry or Madeira set with gelatin or, earlier, calf's-foot stock — was a standing item on refined American tables from the mid-century onward, which is why the recipe can assume a pan of it is already at hand.