Nut Meringues
To Meringue Glaceé mixture add chopped nut meat; almonds, English walnuts, or hickory nuts are preferred.
A one-line variation that assumes you already have the book's Meringue Glacée in front of you: stiffly beaten whites and powdered sugar, shaped and dried in a very cool oven, later filled with ice cream. The nuts change the physics of that foam more than the sentence lets on, so a few things are worth knowing before you fold them in.
- The hinge: fat kills meringueThe hinge: fat and meringue -- Nut meats are roughly half to two-thirds oil, and fat destabilises an egg-white foam. Chop the nuts fine, fold them in with a few strokes at the very end, and shape promptly.
- How much nutThe original gives no quantity. For a meringue built on four egg whites, something in the region of 1/2 to 3/4 cup of finely chopped nuts is a reasonable amount; heavily loaded shells are likelier to crack and weep.
- Dry the nuts firstSpread the chopped nuts on a sheet and warm them at 300F for eight to ten minutes, then cool completely. Damp nut meats bleed moisture into the meringue and leave it sticky in the centre.
- "Slow oven" means very slowOven heat -- Meringue shells of this kind are dried rather than baked: 200-250F for one to two hours depending on size, with the door propped slightly if your oven runs hot. Much above that and they will brown.
- English walnuts and hickory nutsThe "English walnut" is the common walnut, distinguished in American usage from the native black walnut, which is far stronger. Hickory nuts are a wild-gathered relative of the pecan and rarely sold; pecans are the nearest substitute.
- AlmondsBlanched almonds chopped fine, or almonds ground and sieved, behave well here; they are the least oily of the three.
- Weather mattersMeringue draws water from the air. On a humid day the shells will stay tacky no matter how long they dry; make them on a dry day and store them airtight the moment they cool.
- Yield and servingFour whites give roughly ten to twelve small shells, or six pairs sandwiched. They are meant to be filled with ice cream at the table and served at once, since the filling softens the shell within minutes.
Meringue glacée — literally "iced meringue" — came into American cookbooks from French pâtisserie, though just when it took hold is hard to pin down: a dry sugar shell that could be made days ahead and filled with ice cream at the last moment. The nut variation follows a common period habit, where a base formula is given once and then spun out into a short list of derivatives rather than repeated in full. The nuts named are telling of place and period. English walnuts and almonds were imported staples of the grocery trade, while hickory nuts were gathered locally across the Northeast and Midwest and cracked at home — a free ingredient in season, tedious to shell, and largely absent from commerce since, which is why the recipe reads as slightly exotic now and would have read as thrifty then.