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Roman Tartlets
Put the whites of half a dozen eggs into a whipping-bowl and beat them to a froth; add by degrees one-half pound of powdered sugar and after this is worked in add one dessertspoonful of corn starch. Great care must be observed in adding the latter, otherwise the pastry will be tough and useless; the beating must stop and the cornstarch only stirred in. Cover a tin or baking-sheet with oiled paper; on this place as many small rings as will be required, also lined with oiled paper, make them hot, pour two tablespoonfuls of the mixture into each ring, place them in a moderate oven, and as they are baking make an indentation in each with the back of a spoon. When done remove, pile upon them whipped cream, decorate with small pieces of various-colored jellies, and serve.
This is a meringue shell under another name: whipped whites, sugar, a whisper of starch, baked dry and filled at the last minute. Two things decide whether it works — how the cornstarch goes in, and how gently it bakes.
- The hinge: fold, never beatOnce the sugar is fully worked in, the cornstarch is stirred through by hand with a spatula and no more. Continued whipping after the starch goes in knocks the structure down and gives the tough, leathery shell the recipe warns about.
- Quantities in modern termsSix large whites run about 200 g. Half a pound of powdered sugar is 8 oz, roughly 2 cups sifted — a good deal less sugar per white than a standard French meringue, which usually runs about 50 g of sugar per white, so beat the whites only to soft peaks before starting to add sugar. A dessertspoonful is 2 teaspoons.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no numbers; "moderate" in period usage is generally read as somewhere around 350F, which will brown and crack a meringue before it dries. Current practice for shells of this size is 250–275F for 45–60 minutes, then a further hour with the oven off and the door ajar.
- The ringsThese are plain metal flan or tart rings set directly on the lined sheet, not muffin tins; the recipe specifies only "small rings" and gives no size, and does not explain why they are to be made hot. A modern equivalent is to pipe or spoon small mounds straight onto parchment and skip the rings entirely.
- Oiled paperParchment does the job with no oil at all.
- The indentationPress the hollow with the back of a spoon while they bake, as the recipe directs, once the surface has set but the interior is still soft. Left too late and the shell splits.
- Fill at the tableWhipped cream turns a baked meringue soft within the hour. Bake the shells a day ahead if you like, store them airtight and dry, and fill and decorate only as they go out.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; at two tablespoons a ring it will make at least a dozen, and more depending on how much air the whites hold.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 and put his name to this 1896 volume, was cataloguing the working repertoire of a large American hotel kitchen, and that repertoire was overwhelmingly French. The meringue shell filled with cream and finished with bright jelly was a standard of the pastry station — the same idea that appears elsewhere as vacherin, meringue chantilly or meringue baskets. Names attached to such things in nineteenth-century hotel menus were often decorative rather than geographic: "Roman" here most likely signals a style of presentation rather than any documented Italian origin, much as "Roman punch" did on the same menus. What the recipe does record faithfully is a pre-mixer kitchen, where six whites were beaten by hand — the text says only "a whipping-bowl" — and the caution against overworking the starch was a caution about wasted labor as much as wasted eggs.