Of all culinary techniques, meringue is right up there with cakes and mayonnaise (which also benefit from the properties of eggs) for the most miraculous of transformations. How can something so fluffy and glossy come out of the oven so strong and set? There is something magic about meringue: how it can capture bubbles of air, how it can be chewy or crisp, how it can be mousse-like in an Aussie pavlova. Here are (just some of) my thoughts on meringues.

Meringue 101

There are three different ways of making meringues: French, Italian and Swiss. The most common is the basic French method, where cold eggwhites at the soft-peak stage are further whipped with cold sugar added. The Italian method has you whisking the eggwhites as you dribble in a hot (115°C) sugar syrup for a more stable and robust result – ideal for piping, torching, as topping on a lemon meringue pie, or  to cover a baked Alaska. The Swiss method involves whisking the eggwhites and sugar over a pan of hot water until the temperature reaches about 50°C, then whisking it until it’s cool – perfect for frosting cakes and making yakitori meringues. What? I hear you ask.

Yakitori meringue

This is a hot new thing replacing meringue shards and torched plumes of meringue on trendy desserts. Skewered meringue may all be a bit ‘so what?’ for those who make their pavs in the barbecue, but I suppose toasting Swiss meringue on a stick is similar to toasting marshmallows the same way. Anyway, I reckon it’s the ‘liquid puff pastry’ of 2018.

Meringue shards

These are slowly being left behind, back in the mists of the Turnbull era (along with ‘soils’, ‘the smear’ and those disgusting soul patch ‘beards’). These once trendy shaped meringue sheets were flavoured with something robust, like pink peppercorns, rosemary or lavender, to match all the sugar.  Why not make them for your next retro-themed dinner party by spreading out a layer of your favourite meringue on a silicone mat. Bake in a low, slow oven and leave to dry out in the cooling oven.

The Dacquoise base 

It isn’t just macarons that come from stirring nuts or a nut flour into meringue. There are macarons where coconut is the interloper, or my signature Northern Italian Ugly But Good biscuits made with crushed hazelnuts. Then there is what happens when you mix meringue with crushed nuts to make dacquoise discs to use as the base layer for a pastry creation or stacked up to make a dessert like the French coffee dacquoise, where discs of hazelnut and almond meringue sandwich flavoured buttercream. The Kiev Cake from Kiev’s marvellously inappropriately named Karl Marx Confectionery Company or the Filipino sans rival cake take the same approach, but with cashews in the dacquoise. I predict that you will never, ever, need to use this fact, ever.

Meringue pioneers 

History is full of culinary pioneers. Marie-Antoine Carême, the 18th- and 19th-century French superstar chef who reputedly was the first to pipe meringue; Spain’s 20th-century wunderkind, Ferran Adrià, who invented a dehydrated meringue so light it literally vanished when you popped it in your mouth; and then there is Count Rumford, a polymath who designed the coffee pot and the cooking range, invented low-temperature cookery and also discovered how to do magic with food. It was he, supposedly, who worked out, for US president and ice cream fanatic Thomas Jefferson, how to serve ice cream baked in pastry without it melting, for a White House dinner in 1802. He then went one further, using far more fragile meringue to coat ice cream to make his omelette soufflé en surprise in 1804, the first incarnation of what would go on to become Baked Alaska.

Baked Alaska 

The true Baked Alaska is not a cheat-arse high-end restaurant’s zero-skill way with a blowtorch. Other than timely service, I can see no reason why the pastry section don’t it properly and just place a pre-formed dome of frozen ice cream onto a sponge base, cover it with meringue and bang it in a hot oven to tan up. Surely that’s what is exciting, an obviously hot dessert that contains still frozen ice cream! If Charles Ranhofer, legendary chef at Delmonico’s in New York, could manage it back in 1867, surely today’s top pastry guys can do the same?

Eaton mess? 

Meringue is almost as good if dropped on the floor and then reassembled with whipped cream and strawberries, perhaps with a swirl of some matching fruit coulis, in a manner credited to England’s school of privilege, Eton. But then Etonians like smashing things, as we saw when Boris Johnson smashed the European Union with Brexit, and how it was another old Etonian, David Cameron, who called the referendum when PM. At least they can’t be blamed for smashing the meringue, which although not in the original recipe served between 1893 and World War II, was still added before their time. What we can ascertain from all this is that, originally, Eton Mess was actually just strawberries (or bananas, apparently) and cream with a fancy name. This should be seen as giving you every right to make a Mess named after your own alma mater with, say, slices of fresh mango and a passionfruit coulis, fresh raspberries and a lemon curd, or, my personal favourite, bananas and softened ginger marmalade joining the cream and the meringue. With those ingredients, I’d call that a Tully Mess.

Of course, the big question remains: would meringues have been as successful if they had kept their Olde English name, ‘pet’? This was given to them because they were so light and airy, apparently, which is fair enough. The trouble is, the word ‘pet’ comes from the French and Dutch word for ‘fart’. Not sure how many ‘French farts’ you’d sell!

See here for Matt’s latest recipe ‘Individual chewy Black Forest meringues’