No. 3212

Pyramid of Meringues

Buisson de Meringues

Meringues make a delicious dessert. They should be small but of even size and specially of a beautiful golden color; besides they must be exceedingly dry. Select about twenty of the prettiest cold shells; use a small spoon to fill them with good whipped cream (No. 50) sweetened with vanilla sugar (No. 3165); fasten these shells, two by two together, and keep them for two hours in a cool place before dressing them in a pyramid on a napkin.

← No. 3211 Valois Pudding Cold Entremets — Creams, Jellies & Charlottes No. 3213 Rice Mirabeau →

For the Modern Kitchen

An assembly rather than a bake: Ranhofer assumes you already have a tray of meringue shells and a bowl of sweetened whipped cream, and spends his words on how they should look. The points below fill in what he took for granted.

The shells decide everythingThey must be thoroughly dry, or the cream will soften them and the pyramid will slump; Ranhofer insists they be "exceedingly dry." He gives no oven instruction in this entry, but piped meringue is dried rather than baked, in a very low oven over an hour or more, and can be left in the turned-off oven to finish drying. Whether his "beautiful golden color" means a pale ivory or a genuine light tan is not settled by the text.
Shells, not discsA meringue shell here is piped as a small oval or dome and hollowed slightly, so that two of them clamp together around the filling like a shell-shaped sandwich. Make them small — two bites — and uniform, since unevenness shows badly in a stacked arrangement.
No. 50, the whipped creamWhip it to firm peaks, stiffer than you would serve on its own, because slack cream will squeeze out and glue the pyramid into a single mass. Note that here the sweetening is added separately, as vanilla sugar.
No. 3165, vanilla sugarSugar flavored with vanilla bean, made by Ranhofer's own method under that number. A spoonful of ordinary sugar plus a little vanilla extract is the practical substitute, though extract adds moisture and the flavor is less rounded.
Why two hours in a cool placeThe chilling sets the cream so the joined pairs hold together when handled. Ranhofer specifies two hours before dressing and says nothing about longer holding.
Humidity is the enemyMeringue draws water out of the air. On a damp day the shells will turn tacky and leathery even before filling; dry them longer and keep them in an airtight tin until the moment you fill them.
Dressing the pyramidThe napkin serves both as decoration and as a base the shells will not slide on. Build a broad ring first, then narrow each course inward. Assemble on the serving piece, since a built pyramid is awkward to move.
YieldTwenty shells make ten filled pairs — a small dessert for four to six people, in keeping with its place among the entremets rather than as the centerpiece of a meal.

A Little History

Buisson means bush or thicket, and in nineteenth-century French service it named any dish built up into a tall cone or pyramid — a buisson d'écrevisses of crayfish, a buisson of glazed fruit, or this one of meringues. The point was architecture: the grand dinner of Charles Ranhofer's era, spent at Delmonico's in New York, was judged partly on the height and symmetry of what stood on the table, and a folded napkin gave the cook a grippy, disposable plinth. Meringue itself is recorded in French print by the 1690s, in Massialot, and was long a specialty of the pastry-cook rather than the home kitchen, since it demanded an oven cool enough to dry sugar and egg white for hours without coloring them. That The Epicurean (1894) devotes a numbered entry to what is essentially two meringues stuck together with cream says less about difficulty than about the encyclopedic ambition of the book, which catalogues every form a dish could take on the table.