Recipe Challenge - Book #42

Thursday, 18 February 2021

Filled with relief at seeing the Scandinavian horror-show book walk out of the house,  I jumped back into the next challenge just a few days later with a classic recipe book:

Now this book is huge, so rather than spend ages sifting through it, I told myself I'd make the recipe on whatever random page I opened it to (provided it was vegetarian).  So I was pretty pleased with myself when I opened the book straight to Oeufs à la Neige .

On paper this looked delicious - meringues floating on custard - yum! And hardly any ingredients - yay! It was a bit hard knowing what I was aiming for without any pictures so I googled some and it looked doable.  The recipe was quite clever actually - making custard from scratch involves a lot of otherwise wasted egg whites - so what better use for them than meringues. They did require being poached in water which was a bit weird, but aside from that the recipe was straight forward:

One thing noticed when I googled Oeufs a la Neige was that most recipes poached the meringues in milk, whereas Stephanie's version was just water.  Unfortunately this made those delicious looking floating islands actually taste gross and poached eggy.  Ugg.  The custard was okaaay, not amazing - but the meringues were slimy and unpleasant.  Jett took two spoonfuls and abandoned it.  I had the custard only.

I did further research and it seems that the original recipe has developed over time and is now more like this:

i.e served with caramel sauce or toffee or roasted nuts and the meringue is poached in milk which I imagine improves them.  So basically the simple version I made was a failure.  

So this puts me in a dilema- after 15 years of barely using this rather heftly (and critically acclaimed) book, the only recipe I've made from it recently has been a dud.  Hmm..