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Florentine Meringues
Cover the bottom of a baking-pan with a sheet of puff-paste rolled out thin, spread some jelly over it and cover all with meringue-paste mixed with chopped almonds. Sprinkle over with sugar, bake in a moderate oven, and cut into squares.
A three-layer bar cookie in shorthand: puff pastry, jam, almond meringue. Oscar assumes a cook who already knows what meringue-paste is and how puff pastry behaves, so the gaps are worth filling in.
- The hinge: cut while warmMeringue shatters once it is fully cold, and cold puff pastry crushes under a knife. Let the sheet settle five to ten minutes out of the oven, then cut with a long thin blade wiped clean between cuts.
- Moderate oven350F. At that heat the almond meringue will colour to a light tan in roughly 25-30 minutes while the pastry beneath cooks through. If the top is browning before the pastry has risen and set, drop to 325F and give it longer.
- Puff-paste, rolled thinAbout 1/8 inch, laid in a rimmed sheet or jelly-roll pan. Dock it well with a fork before it goes in, or the base will lift and push the jelly and meringue into a dome.
- Meringue-pasteWhites beaten stiff with sugar; a standard ratio is roughly 4 whites to a cup of sugar, beaten to firm glossy peaks, with the chopped almonds folded in at the end so the mixture is not deflated.
- JellyA firm, high-pectin jelly (currant, quince, apple) rather than a loose jam. Anything watery will steam under the meringue and soften the pastry. A thin scrape is enough; a thick layer will boil out at the edges.
- Sprinkle over with sugarGranulated, lightly, over the meringue. It helps give the crisp, slightly cracked crust typical of a sugared meringue top.
- YieldA standard 10x15 inch sheet cuts into roughly 35 two-inch squares. They will keep a day in a tin, though the meringue softens as the jelly's moisture works upward.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection - Oscar was the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel rather than its chef, and the book is a compilation - draws on the French-trained repertoire that ran every grand American hotel of the period, and the pastry chapters lean heavily on it. "Florentine" in nineteenth-century pastry usage generally signals almonds - the same association that gives us the lace-thin almond florentine - rather than any documented link to the city itself. The construction here, a sheet of puff paste spread with preserve and masked with nut meringue, then baked and cut into squares, looks like a hotel economy: it may well have used up puff-paste trimmings and leftover whites from the kitchen's egg-yolk-heavy sauces and custards, though that is inference rather than record, and it yields dozens of uniform pieces for a tea tray or a banquet dessert service without any individual shaping.