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Apple Meringue
Use Meringue I and pile lightly on baked apples, brown in oven, cool, and serve with Boiled Custard. Canned peaches, drained from their liquor, may be prepared in the same way. Whites 3 eggs
A three-line instruction that assumes you already have two other recipes from the same book in hand. The meringue and the custard are the work; the apples are the easy part.
- What Meringue I isThe book's plain meringue is egg whites beaten stiff with powdered (confectioners') sugar folded in; the exact proportion is not given on this page, and a figure of roughly two tablespoons of sugar per white is a modern working estimate rather than the book's own. Beat the whites stiff before the sugar goes in, or the meringue is liable to slump off the apples in the oven.
- Oven for browning"Brown in oven" gives no temperature; the original works without numbers. In a modern oven a moderate heat, around 350F for 12 to 15 minutes, will tan the peaks and set the meringue through. Higher heat colours the tips before the interior cooks and can leave a raw, weeping layer underneath.
- The apples firstBake the apples fully before the meringue goes on, cored, in a dish with a little water and sugar. The recipe gives no temperature or time; roughly 375F for 40 to 50 minutes depending on size works in a modern oven. A firm baking apple holds its shape; a soft variety such as McIntosh collapses into sauce under the weight of the meringue.
- Pile lightlySpoon the meringue on in soft mounds without smoothing or pressing. Meringue set on a wet fruit base tends to bead and slide as it cools.
- Boiled CustardThe book's boiled custard is a stirred stovetop custard, not a baked one, and it is not meant actually to boil. Cook it over hot water or low direct heat, stirring, until it coats a spoon -- around 170 to 180F. Pushed much beyond that it curdles.
- Timing and holding"Cool, and serve" means the same day. Meringue on a wet fruit base beads and slides fairly quickly, and it does not survive a night in the refrigerator. Assemble, bake, cool to room temperature, serve.
- The canned peach versionDrain the halves well and blot them dry; the syrup clinging to the fruit is the main cause of a collapsing meringue. Cut side up, hollow filled with the meringue, same oven.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Three whites make enough meringue for roughly half a dozen apples, or a comparable number of peach halves, with a few spoonfuls of custard each.
Apple meringue belongs to a large family of late nineteenth-century desserts built on the same logic: yolks go into the custard, whites go on top of the fruit, and nothing is wasted. Fannie Merritt Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) is organised this way, with cross-references standing in for repeated instructions, so a cook was expected to work from several pages at once. The alternative given here -- canned peaches, drained -- is a marker of the period: commercially canned fruit was widely available and increasingly cheap by the 1890s, and cookbooks of the era do offer it as an off-season stand-in for fresh. The custard poured around such dishes was commonly called "boiled custard" in American books of the period, a name that survived long after cooks understood that boiling it was the thing to avoid.