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Snowy Mountains
Butter six circular rusks, and put on them a layer of jam. Beat the whites of three eggs and place them on the rusks in the shape of pyamide. Put them in the oven and color a little. They must be served hot.
A three-ingredient nursery pudding that lives or dies on timing: the meringue wants heat only long enough to set and take colour, or the rusk beneath turns to paste.
- What a rusk isA circular rusk here is most likely Dutch-Belgian beschuit — a light, dry, twice-baked disc roughly 3 to 4 inches across, now sold in cylindrical sleeves. Zwieback, Swedish skorpor or a plain dry sponge biscuit will stand in; anything soft will collapse under the jam.
- Oven heatThe original gives none. Meringue that need only "color a little" wants a hot oven, around 425F, for 3 to 5 minutes, watched. A broiler set low works as well and faster.
- Unsweetened whitesThree whites with no sugar is what the text says; unsweetened whites beat to a stiff but fragile foam that tastes of nothing and is prone to weeping. Two tablespoons of caster sugar per white gives a meringue that holds its pyramid better and browns more evenly; otherwise the jam is the only sweetness.
- "Pyamide"A typesetter's slip for pyramide — pyramid. Pile the whites high in a peak on each rusk rather than spreading them flat, and seal the meringue right out to the edge so the jam does not bubble through.
- Butter and jam orderThe butter probably does as much work as a barrier as a seasoning, sealing the rusk against the jam. Spread it thinly but completely and use a stiff, well-set preserve — a loose jam will soak the base while the meringue bakes.
- Serve at onceHot meringue over cold jam starts to slump as soon as it leaves the oven. Bake these after the plates are on the table, not before.
- YieldSix, one rusk each, as a light pudding or a tea dish.
The Belgian Cook Book was published in 1915, assembled from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion, and sold in aid of relief work. Many of its dishes are cheap, quick and built from pantry staples rather than the restaurant cookery of Brussels. Snowy Mountains is a good example: buttered rusk, a spoonful of jam, three egg whites, and a few minutes of oven heat. The rusk itself points to the Low Countries, where beschuit has long been an everyday bread substitute, eaten with butter and sugar at breakfast; in the Netherlands it is also brought out, with sugared aniseed, to celebrate a birth. Meringue-topped puddings of this kind — jam under a browned white foam — appear widely in nineteenth-century European home cooking, and were often a way to use up whites left over when a recipe called for yolks alone.