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Meringue, Francaise
Carefully break four cold, fresh eggs; place the whites in a clean copper basin, lay the basin on the ice and with a thin wire whisk beat them up to a stiff froth; add a teaspoon vanilla essence and two ounces fine sugar. Carefully mix with a skimmer all over, but principally at the bottom, and use as required. This meringue should only be made at the last moment before using.
A bare-bones French meringue — whites, sugar, vanilla — meant to be folded together and used immediately as a component rather than baked on its own. Two details in the original will strike a modern cook as odd: the copper basin and the very small amount of sugar.
- The hinge: sugar goes in at the end, by foldingThe whites are beaten to a stiff froth first, then the sugar is folded in with a skimmer, "principally at the bottom," where sugar sinks. Do this with a flexible spatula and as few strokes as possible; beating the sugar in afterward, or stirring rather than folding, deflates the foam. The book's insistence that it be made at the last moment is consistent with how quickly a finished foam of this kind breaks down.
- Two ounces of sugar is very littleFour large whites run about 4 1/2 oz (130 g), so 2 oz (a scant 1/3 cup) is roughly a 1:2 sugar-to-white ratio by weight. A modern French meringue for piping and baking commonly uses equal weights of sugar and whites, and up to twice the weight of sugar for crisp meringues. At this ratio the foam is light but weeps and collapses quickly if you let them stand — again, hence the last-minute instruction.
- The copper basinCopper ions bind to the egg-white proteins and produce a more stable, harder-to-overbeat foam; this is real chemistry, not superstition. Stainless steel or glass works, and a pinch of cream of tartar gives much the same insurance. Never use aluminium, which greys the whites, or plastic, which holds grease.
- Cold whites on iceChilled whites whip more slowly and to less volume than whites at about 65F, which is why modern practice lets them stand out first. Here the basin is set on ice for the beating itself, and an under-sugared meringue kept cool sheds liquid more slowly.
- Vanilla essenceRead this as vanilla extract, a teaspoon. Strength varies between products; if yours is a concentrated paste or a bean, scale down.
- Wire whisk means a balloon whiskA large thin-wired balloon whisk and about five minutes of steady work. A stand mixer does it in two to three, but stop at firm, glossy peaks — overbeaten whites go grainy and separate, and there is not enough sugar here to rescue them.
- Yield and useAbout 4 cups of loose foam, enough to top one 9-inch pie or to fold into a mousse or a Bavarian. The recipe itself specifies no baking, only "use as required." Whites left raw in a cold dish are a food-safety matter — use pasteurized whites if nothing will be cooked.
French meringue — whites and sugar beaten cold, with no cooked syrup and no heat — is the plainest of the three classical meringues, the others being Italian (whites beaten with boiling syrup) and Swiss (whites and sugar warmed over water). Its appearance here as a numbered building block rather than a finished dish is consistent with kitchens that taught base preparations to be drawn on for pies, entremets, soufflés and iced desserts as the menu required. The copper effect on egg foam was known in kitchens by observation long before it was explained chemically in the twentieth century. The word meringue appears in print in French cookery by the end of the seventeenth century; a persistent but poorly documented tradition attributes it to a pastry cook in the Swiss town of Meiringen.