Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Italian Meringues
Italian Meringues
Place a pound and a quarter of sugar in a boiler and boil to the blow degree and place the boiler in a large basin of cold water to set the sugar. Work the sugar against the side of the pan; when it is nearly transparent pour in the in the whites of four eggs, then the juice of one lemon and a liqueur glassful of liqueur and mix thoroughly. Have some strips of paper arranged on a board, place on them small quantities of the paste arranged in the shape of eggs and bake in the oven with the door open until they begin to color. Take them out and off the paper and they are ready for use. They require to be dried rather than baked; therefore the oven must not be hot enough to color a piece of paper. The paste previous to being made can be colored either brown or saffron with chocolate or a light-rose pink with a few drops of cochineal. In making these meringues more sugar is used than for the ordinary ones; therefore they do not require to be dredged with sugar before they are baked. They should be taken off the paper and pressed together or they can be scooped in the center and be filled with cream; they may also be covered with transparent ice by dipping them in it.
A sugar-heavy meringue built on an old confectioner's method rather than the modern one, so the sequence looks backwards until you recognize what the sugar is doing.
- "The blow degree"One of the old sugar stages, usually put somewhere in the region of 235-240F (113-116C), between thread and soft ball, though period tables disagree with one another. The name comes from blowing through a skimmer dipped in the syrup and seeing bubbles form.
- "Boiler" means saucepanA heavy sugar pan or small saucepan, not a double boiler and not a baking dish. The cold-water bath is a stop-the-cooking step, not an ice bath — it should arrest the syrup without setting it hard.
- The hinge: working the sugarRubbing the cooled syrup against the side of the pan seeds crystallization and works it toward a soft fondant. Add the whites at that point, not while the syrup is hot; too much working and it seizes into a solid lump.
- Not a modern Italian meringueToday the term means whipping whites while pouring in syrup at about 240F, which partially cooks them. Here the whites go into cooled fondant, so they are never heated by the sugar. Use pasteurized whites.
- Oven temperature"dried rather than baked" with the door open points to the lowest setting a modern oven will hold, of the order of 175-200F (80-95C), with the door propped ajar. The recipe gives no time; allow an hour or more depending on size, and they should stay pale and lift cleanly.
- Liqueur glassAbout 1 fluid ounce, 2 tablespoons. Maraschino, kirsch or curacao would all be plausible period choices; the recipe does not say which.
- Sugar ratioA pound and a quarter of sugar to four whites is roughly triple a modern meringue's sugar, which is why the mixture is a stiff paste you shape by hand or pipe rather than a foam. It also explains the note about not dredging with sugar first.
- Cochineal and "transparent ice"Cochineal is carmine, the insect-derived red still sold as a food color; an allergen for a small number of people. "Transparent ice" is most likely a clear sugar glaze, thinned with water or liqueur, into which the dried shells are dipped.
- Paper and yieldSubstitute parchment for the strips of paper. The quantity given makes a large batch; the recipe states no yield.
Oscar Tschirky, maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf and then the Waldorf-Astoria, published his Cook Book in 1896 as a compendium of the hotel's professional kitchen, and the pastry chapters lean heavily on French confectionery practice as it was taught in the nineteenth century. The distinction between an "ordinary" meringue and an Italian one turned on the sugar: the plain kind was whipped raw and dusted with sugar before baking, while the Italian took cooked syrup, which gave a denser, glossier, more stable paste that could be piped into shapes, tinted and glazed. Meringue is generally traced to late seventeenth-century continental cookery, the name appearing in French print by the 1690s, with the attachment to the Swiss town of Meiringen a traditional and undocumented story. The egg shapes, the chocolate and saffron tints and the rose pink from cochineal suggest banquet rather than family work.