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Dessert

Strawberry Meringue

A sponge cake topped with strawberries and meringue, baked briefly until lightly browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Strawberry Meringue

Oven, in the book's wordsA slack oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cake

  1. Bake a sheet of sponge cake in a jelly cake pan.

  2. Remove it warm and press it, top side down, into a dinner plate to shape it hollow.

Make the topping

  1. Mix sugar with strawberries in a bowl.

  2. Spread the mixture on the cake.

  3. Whip egg whites until firm. Mix in sugar.

  4. Spread the meringue over the berries.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake with the oven door open for about 5 minutes, or until lightly colored. Place a board under the plate to prevent overheating.

  2. Serve cold.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Whipped into a foam that forms the meringue topping and sets lightly when baked.
Strawberries
Provide moisture and fruity flavor beneath the meringue.
Sugar
Sweetens the berries and stabilizes the whipped egg white meringue.
Sponge cake
Forms the light, absorbent base that holds the berry layer.

The step that matters

Baking the meringue. Egg white meringue can overheat and brown or weep quickly, so the oven door is left open and a board under the plate limits heat. Watching for light color keeps it soft rather than dry.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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