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Dessert

Italian Meringues

A sweet dessert made from sugar and whipped egg whites, flavored with lemon or liqueur.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and saffron match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 538 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Italian Meringues

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the sugar until it reaches the boiling degree, then place the sugar boiler in a bowl of cold water.

  2. Work the sugar against the sides of the pan with a spoon until semi-opalized.

Build the meringue

  1. Whip the egg whites until stiff and frothy.

  2. Add the whipped egg whites, lemon juice, and liqueur, mixing thoroughly but lightly.

  3. As the mixture cools, it will firm up for shaping.

Shape and dry

  1. Use a biscuit-forcer to shape the meringues into desired forms like hearts or crescents.

  2. Dry the meringues in the oven at a low temperature, ensuring it doesn't color a piece of white paper.

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. Lemon + saffrontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together538 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Sugar + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  4. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Cooked into a syrup that sets the meringue structure and gives sweetness.
Egg whites
Whipped into foam that gives the meringue its airy structure.

The step that matters

Add the whipped egg whites to the sugar syrup. The syrup must be cooled slightly before the whites are folded in. Hot syrup can cook the egg proteins unevenly and deflate the foam, while mixing too hard knocks out the air that gives the meringue its volume.

Swap the saffron

The recipe marks saffron as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, egg, lemon, chocolate):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Gingerfits better
  4. Saffronthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, lemon, chocolate. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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