No. 116

How to Dress Meringues

Pour Dresser les Meringues

Prepare a meringue paste as in No. 140. Pour the preparation into a pocket furnished with a socket and push it into rounds on to white paper bands; dust them over with fine sugar and press down the middle lightly, so as to efface the tip, formed by the socket, then range these paper bands on top of some wet boards. Cook the meringues on these boards in a very slack oven, leaving them in for fifty minutes; they must be of a fine golden color and well-dried; after taking them from the oven, detach them carefully from the paper, and remove all the soft parts from the insides, using a teaspoon for this purpose, then lay them immediately on a raised edged tin sheet, one beside the other, the hollow part uppermost, and keep them in a warm heater for twelve hours.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes you have already made the meringue paste of No. 140 and are only being told how to shape, bake and dry it. The instructions are sound, but the vocabulary and the oven are of their time.

"Pocket furnished with a socket"A pastry bag fitted with a tube. The "tip" he tells you to efface is the little peak left where the bag is pulled away, which is why he has you press the middle down lightly.
A very slack ovenSlack is the coolest working heat in this vocabulary; Ranhofer gives no figures, and a low modern oven of roughly 200-250F is the nearest equivalent. Fifty minutes at such a heat sets and dries the shells without inflating or cracking them.
Paper bands and wet boardsWhite paper bands are strips of baking parchment; strips let you lift a whole row at once. The wet boards are a heat buffer — damp wood under the paper keeps the base of each meringue from taking direct oven heat. A doubled sheet pan, or a sheet pan set inside a second one, does the same job now.
"Fine sugar"Superfine or caster sugar, dusted over the piped rounds. It draws a thin crust that gives the finished shell its gloss and its faint crackle; ordinary granulated is coarse enough to sit in visible grains.
Golden colorRanhofer wants his meringues blond, not white; pull them pale if you want white shells for filling with colored creams, so long as they are still dried through.
Hollowing while warmThe scooping must happen immediately out of the oven, as the recipe specifies. Once the interior cools it sets sticky and tears the shell when you dig at it. Work fast, one row at a time.
Twelve hours in a warm heaterThe heater was the warming cupboard above or beside a coal range — steady, dry, perhaps 100-140F. A dehydrator, a proving drawer, or an oven with the light on and the door propped will finish the drying. The point is to drive out the last moisture so the shells keep crisp and store for days.
What they are forThese hollow shells are components, not a dessert on their own: paired around whipped cream or ice cream as meringues Chantilly, or filled and glazed.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's account of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its "Elementary Methods" section is essentially a professional syllabus — the numbered building blocks that the later recipes refer back to. Meringue as a piped, oven-dried confection belongs to the French pastry tradition Ranhofer trained in; the name is already recorded in French confectionery writing by the end of the seventeenth century, and the technique of hollowing the baked shell and drying it in a warming cupboard was familiar pâtisserie practice by his day. What dates the entry is not the method but the equipment it takes for granted: paper bands rather than parchment sheets, wet wooden boards as a heat diffuser, and a range whose "very slack" oven and adjoining heater a cook judged by hand and habit rather than by a dial.