Meringue II
Whites 3 eggs ½ teaspoon lemon extract or 1/3 teaspoon vanilla 7½ tablespoons powdered sugar Beat whites until stiff, add four tablespoons sugar gradually, and beat vigorously; fold in remaining sugar, and add flavoring. Cook eight minutes in a slow oven.
A pie meringue from the Boston Cooking-School book, printed with its ingredient list scrambled around the method — the four egg whites appear at the very end. Read it as: whites of 4 eggs, 7½ tablespoons powdered sugar, and the flavoring.
- "Powdered sugar" is not confectioners' sugarIn this period powdered sugar generally meant granulated sugar crushed fine — closest today to superfine or caster sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch, so superfine is the nearer substitute if you have it.
- The sugar quantity7½ tablespoons is a scant half cup, about 3½ oz. That is roughly 25 g of sugar per white, a soft meringue in the American pie-topping tradition rather than the stiff, sugar-heavy French kind.
- Slow ovenRoughly 250–300°F. At that range eight minutes will set and barely color the surface; expect a pale, marshmallowy topping rather than a crisp one, and expect the interior to stay soft and moist.
- Eight minutes is short by modern standardsMost current recipes bake pie meringue 12–15 minutes at 325–350°F, partly for color and partly because the inside of a thick meringue baked only eight minutes at 300°F may not get hot enough to be considered fully cooked. If that matters to you, bake longer or use pasteurized whites.
- Add the first sugar graduallyThe instruction to beat in four tablespoons "gradually, and beat vigorously" is the hinge. Sugar dumped in at once collapses the foam; added a spoonful at a time to whites already stiff, it dissolves and stabilizes them. The remaining sugar is folded, not beaten, so the volume survives.
- Spread it onto a warm filling, sealed to the crustThe book does not say so, but meringue laid on a cold filling and left short of the pastry edge is commonly blamed for weeping underneath and shrinking away at the rim. Spread it to touch the crust all the way round.
- Cream of tartarNot called for here. A scant ¼ teaspoon beaten into the whites at the start gives noticeably more insurance against collapse.
- YieldEnough to top one 9-inch pie generously.
This appears to be one of two meringues Fannie Farmer gives in connection with pies in the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, the difference being little more than the proportion of sugar and the flavoring umical variants rather than describing them in prose. Soft meringue spread over a pie was a familiar nineteenth-century American practice, though sweetened beaten-white toppings on tarts and pies have earlier European precedent; it turned a lemon or custard filling into something showy. The word itself came into English from French in the eighteenth century; its origin is unsettled, though it is often traced to the Swiss town of Meiringen, a story generally repeated but not documented. Lemon extract as the default flavoring, with vanilla as the alternative, is a good marker of the period: extracts were among the first reliably standardized bottled flavorings available to home cooks, and Farmer used them freely.