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Chocolate Meringues
Put the whites of three eggs in a basin with one pound of finely-crushed sugar, beat well for about fifteen minutes; then add three more whites, putting them in singly and beating one up well before another one is added; then mix in two teaspoonfuls of vanilla and three ounces of grated chocolate. Put this in a biscuit forcer, let it drop on a well-buttered baking-sheet, place the meringues in a slow oven and bake for a few minutes.
A Swiss-style meringue made without heat: the sugar goes in at the start and the whites are worked into it in two stages. The instruction that will mislead you is the last one.
- "Bake for a few minutes" is wrong for these"Bake for a few minutes" is far too short for meringues of this size. Expect one to one and a half hours in a very low oven (about 200-225F), then a further hour in the turned-off oven with the door ajar. A few minutes at any temperature leaves the centres wet.
- Slow ovenThe recipe gives no temperature, and "slow" in period usage covers a range generally taken as somewhere around 300F, which is still too hot for meringue and will turn them fawn-coloured and cracked. Treat 200-225F as the working figure.
- One pound of sugarThat is roughly 2 1/4 cups. "Finely-crushed" means caster or superfine sugar, which was made by crushing and sifting loaf sugar; ordinary granulated works but needs longer beating to dissolve, and undissolved sugar is what makes meringues bead with syrup.
- The two-stage beatingThree whites into a pound of sugar gives a stiff paste rather than a foam, so the fifteen minutes is not optional. In a stand mixer, five to six minutes on medium-high does it, then the remaining three whites one at a time with a minute or two between each.
- Six whitesSix large egg whites are about 6 fl oz, or 180g. Have them at room temperature; cold whites take much longer to loosen into the sugar paste.
- The chocolateThree ounces grated fine, folded in by hand at the very end. Fat works against the foam, so fold rather than beating it in on the machine, and grate it as finely as you can or it will clog the piping tip.
- Biscuit forcerA piping bag with a plain half-inch tip. Parchment or a silicone mat serves better than the buttered sheet the recipe calls for; butter encourages spreading and the sugar still sticks.
- YieldRoughly forty to fifty meringues of an inch and a half across. They keep a week in an airtight tin and go soft in a humid kitchen.
Meringue was established in the English-language kitchen by way of France, and in large hotel kitchens of the later nineteenth century it was standard work: cheap in materials, showy on a plate, and a use for whites left over from custards, glazes and the like. The method here -- sugar beaten into raw whites, with no heat applied to the mixture -- is what is now usually called a French or cold meringue; Swiss meringue, by contrast, is whites and sugar warmed over water, and Italian meringue is made with a hot syrup. A stiff cold-beaten paste of this kind holds a piped shape well and can stand while other work is finished. The "biscuit forcer" was a syringe-type tool with interchangeable nozzles, used alongside and before the cloth pastry bag.