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Meringues and Kisses
2 egg-whites
Pinch of salt
½ cup powdered sugar
½ teaspoon flavoring
Beat the egg-whites stiff, adding the salt. Add the sugar gradually, beating constantly, and heap in rounds or press through a pastry bag on to a wet board covered with an ungreased paper. Bake on the board in a very slow oven (320° F.) for threequarters of an hour. The kisses should be very light brown and quite dry. If they adhere to the paper, moisten the other side of the paper by placing it on a wet cloth, and they will slip off easily.
The smaller shapes or kisses may be stuck together in pairs with a little white of egg, and the meringues, which are usually made larger, may be scooped out and filled with ice-cream or whipped cream.
A plain French meringue, written before parchment paper and thermostats were standard. Two details need translating: the sugar quantity is lower than modern practice, and "very slow" here is warmer than the low oven most bakers now use for meringue.
- The hinge: dry, don't bakeThe goal is dehydration, not colour. The book's 320°F will set and lightly brown them in 45 minutes; most current recipes hold 200-225°F for 1½ to 2 hours instead, which keeps them white and crisp all the way through. At 320°F watch for cracking and weeping if the sugar is not fully dissolved.
- Sugar ratio½ cup of powdered sugar is roughly 2 oz for two whites, about half the sugar in a standard meringue (2 oz per white). The result is lighter and less sweet but noticeably more fragile and quicker to soften in humid air. Increasing to a full cup gives the sturdy shells you can scoop and fill.
- Powdered sugarModern confectioners' sugar contains 3-5 percent cornstarch, which the 1900s article did not always have. It helps stability but can leave a faint chalkiness; superfine granulated, added a spoonful at a time and beaten until no grit remains between your fingers, dissolves more cleanly.
- "Flavoring"Unspecified in the original, as period books often left the choice to the cook: vanilla, almond or rose extract all suit. Use ½ teaspoon of any of them; alcohol-based extracts in this quantity will not deflate the foam.
- The wet board and paperA board dampened under the paper moderates bottom heat and helps release. Parchment on a heavy baking sheet does the same job; the steaming-the-paper release is unnecessary with parchment, though it still works on plain paper.
- Grease and yolkFat in the bowl or a speck of yolk in the whites can stop them whipping up stiff. Wipe the bowl and beater with vinegar or lemon juice first, and separate the eggs cold, then let the whites come to room temperature before beating.
- Yield and holdingTwo whites make about 24 small kisses or 8-10 meringue shells. Cool them in the turned-off oven with the door ajar, then store airtight; they go leathery within hours in a humid kitchen and should be filled with cream only just before serving.
Meringue as a whipped-and-dried sugar confection appears in European cookery from the late seventeenth century onward, and the name is generally traced to French usage, though the technique spread through English and German kitchens under other names as well. "Kiss" is an English domestic word for the small version — a nursery-scale sweet, two of them cemented back to back with a dab of raw white — and American cookbooks used kiss and meringue almost interchangeably through the nineteenth century, distinguishing them mostly by size, as this entry does. In a general household manual, meringues were valued less as pastry-chef work than as thrift, a use for the whites left over from the yolks that went into custards, sauces and rich cakes. Long slow drying also suited a coal or wood range at the tail end of the day, when the fire was dying back and the oven was too cool for anything else.