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Strawberry Meringue
Beat one breakfast cupful of powdered sugar with five or six eggs for a few minutes, then add one-fourth of a pound of warmed butter and one teacupful of milk; mix one teaspoonful of baking-powder with three breakfast cupfuls of flour, then sift it gradually into the above mixture, and stir until smooth. Turn the mixture into a large shallow baking-pan, spreading it thinly, but making it thicker around the edges than in the middle, as the paste is liable to rise in the center. Bake the cake, and then put a layer of freshly-picked strawberries on the top, cover them with meringue, then place the cake in the oven for a minute or two. When lightly colored on the top, take the cake out of the oven, cut it into squares, and serve.
A sheet-pan butter cake finished with fresh berries and a quick meringue, from a kitchen that assumed its readers could fill in the gaps. Several of those gaps are worth naming before you start.
- The cup measuresPeriod cup names were not standardised. A breakfast cupful is usually read as about a standard 8 oz cup, though some sources make it larger; a teacupful is smaller, commonly reckoned at about three-quarters of a cup. On that reading the batter is roughly 1 cup sugar, 3 cups flour, 3/4 cup milk and 1/2 cup (4 oz) butter -- the butter alone being exact, since one-fourth of a pound is 4 oz.
- "Powdered sugar" is not confectioners'In 1896 powdered sugar meant granulated sugar ground fine, closer to today's superfine or caster sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and will give a denser, drier crumb. Use superfine, or pulse granulated sugar briefly in a processor.
- The meringue is unwrittenNo quantities are given for it. A workable proportion for a half-sheet of cake is 4 egg whites beaten to soft peaks with about 1/2 cup superfine sugar added a spoonful at a time. The batter uses whole eggs, so the whites for the meringue are extra.
- Baking the cakeNo temperature or time is given. For a thinly spread batter in a half-sheet pan, 350F for 20 to 25 minutes, until the center springs back, is a reasonable modern reading. The instruction to build the edges thicker than the middle is sound; the recipe itself notes the paste is liable to rise in the center.
- Browning the meringue"A minute or two" only works in a very hot oven, 450F or under a broiler with the pan watched constantly. At that speed the meringue colors before the egg white is cooked through; if that matters to you, use pasteurized whites, or give it 12 to 15 minutes at 325F for a firmer, safer meringue that browns more slowly.
- Berries under meringueHull and halve the strawberries and pat them dry. Wet fruit weeps under the meringue and slackens it. The original asks only for freshly-picked berries and gives no reason.
- Baking powderOne teaspoon to three cups of flour is light by modern standards, and period baking powders varied in strength. Two teaspoons will give a more reliable rise in a cake carrying this much butter and egg.
- YieldA half-sheet pan cuts into 12 to 16 squares. Serve the day it is made; meringue over fruit weeps by the second day.
Oscar Tschirky presided over the Waldorf dining rooms rather than its stoves, and his 1896 Cook Book gathered together the hotel repertoire alongside a great deal of ordinary American home cooking. This is the latter: a sheet cake dressed with berries and meringue, a cousin of the strawberry shortcakes that filled American cookbooks through the late nineteenth century, when cultivated strawberries had become cheap and abundant in June and railroads were beginning to stretch the season. The meringue finish—whipped whites browned briefly in a hot oven—was the standard period way of gilding a pudding or pie. The vagueness about quantities for it is typical: any cook the book expected to reach for it already knew what a meringue was. Note too the measuring by breakfast cup and teacup, a domestic habit that Fannie Farmer's standardized level cup, published the same year, would eventually displace.