Moby Dick is the story of how one man is slowly driven mad by his doomed hunt for a white whale. This is the story of how one man is slowly driven mad by his doomed attempt to make Petits Monts Blancs.
The road to Petits Monts Blancs – “Little White Mountains” – has many obstacles. The easy part is making the topping – the brown part, with sweetened chestnut puree – intended to symbolise the dark, middle part of the mountain. Just whisk the ingredients together, and wham! You’ve got your topping. In fact, my advice: just eat the topping. Or buy the meringue from a shop.
If, however, you really, really want to make your own meringues – if perhaps you’ve never suffered in life – then I have helpfully collected a series of tips on what not to do.
“If even one speck of yolk gets into the white, it won’t be suitable for whisking,” Delia warns. Now, this is not, strictly speaking, true. If you get a little bit of yolk left in your whites and you are whisking in order to make a cake, you will end up with something edible, if a little dense. If you are making souffle, it will be ugly, but tasty. But, in the case of meringue: if even the teeniest fleck of yolk ends up in there, you are not making meringue. All you’ll get for half an hour’s whisking is a sore wrist and white goo.
It’s not just yolk that can stop your meringue. Tiny bits of grease on your whisk or in your bowl will stop your meringue. Drying your whisk or your bowl with a tea towel you have used before – even if it’s just to dry your own hands – will stop your meringue. If, say, your recipe calls on you to measure out sugar, and there is the smallest trace of butter left in that measuring dish – it will go in there with the sugar, and it will stop your meringue.
Meringue is a fragile thing, as indeed is sanity, and attempting to make meringue may well break yours. But provided you have washed everything thoroughly – and dried everything with a fresh tea towel – the good news is that the only difficulty you will have is separating the whites from the yolks. Delia has a good method for this: you need three bowls – one for the yolks, one to break the eggs over, and one for the whites. The importance of the second bowl cannot be overestimated. If something goes wrong on the third egg, and you only have two bowls, you have wasted an evening.
I’m going to add another suggestion: if you have a bad run – say, hypothetically, you have ended up with yolk in the whites twice in a row – stop. Just take a break for a little bit. Listen to some music. Read a book. Don’t, on any account, keep on breaking the eggs, getting increasingly irritable as the evening wears on, finally snapping at your partner that “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways of separating eggs that don’t work.”
Not that I, or anyone who looks like me, has ever done any of those things. What I did instead is what you should do: break the egg in two, gradually moving the egg yolk from one half to another, until all you are left with is the yolk. My advice is not to get greedy: an egg yolk with a little white left over is still useful for cooking. The reverse is not. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to find a recipe that requires 24 egg yolks.
- Stephen Bush is cooking his way through Delia’s Complete How To Cook (BBC Books, £40) in a year; @stephenkb. You can watch Delia Smith’s free Online Cookery School videos at deliaonline.com; @DeliaOnline
