In which meringue shells are not to be found for love nor money

[carbonel]

Tomorrow, I'm having some friends over for cards and a light collation. Here is the current planned menu, which is also serving as a reminder for me not to forget any of these.

Savories
Quesadillas
Cucumber sandwiches
Radish sandwiches (I may only make one of these two)
Potato chips
Onion dip
Terra chips
(I also bought a packet of Bugles totally on impulse, but I think three chiplike items is one too many. Possibly two too many, actually.)

Sweets
Brownies (already made; need to be defrosted)
Palmiers
Watermelon
Eton mess

It's that last one that led to my fruitless (as it were) quest. An Eton mess is a classic British summertime dessert consisting of slightly sweetened whipped cream mixed with macerated strawberries and broken bits of meringue shells, topped with more strawberry. Variations can include many different fruits, of course. But all of the recipes I looked at online called for commercial meringue shells to be broken up.

The Target grocery (my usual one) doesn't carry meringue shells -- no surprise there. Cub (big box grocery chain) also doesn't carry meringue shells, or even meringue cookies, though it does carry meringue powder. Since that was around $6, and I already had eggs and sugar, I didn't choose that route. The one that really surprised me is that Kowalski's also doesn't carry meringue shells. I didn't try Trader Joe's because that was too far away to drive to for just one item. Luckily, the recipe from the Telegraph also included an added recipe for making your own meringue -- though I've been making chocolate chip meringue cookies for years, and would have coped just fine on my own.

I wonder if meringue shells are a standard item in British grocery stores. They certainly aren't in my local options for groceries, though I know I've seen them from time to time.

As long as I'm musing about things culinary, I have a question about strawberries. Does anyone else cut out the white core bit from their strawberries when they're cleaning them? My mother never did; she just slice off the tops. But I don't like the texture, so after I slice off the tops, I cut it out as part of the cleaning process. Am I the weird one, or is she? (I can't attribute it to laziness on my mother's part; for years, she cut off the little thorny spikes on asparagus, until we persuaded her that once you cook them, they pretty much disappear. Strawberry cores are much easier to deal with.)

Comments

[graydon]

With large commercial strawberries, cutting out the core seems only prudent.

Actual strawberries less than a centimeter in major axis dimension, no. Especially since the core generally stays on the stem when you pick them.

[carbonel]

I have had the things you describe as "actual strawberries" a couple of times in my life. They have a lovely intense strawberry flavor and at least double the aroma of standard commercial strawberries. But around here, those are much much rarer even than commercial meringue shells.

[graydon]

Strawberries like that grew feral -- I don't think I can quite say wild -- on the farm I spent much of my childhood on. These made a lasting impression and rather put me off the commercial berry.

Of course they're tiny, nigh-invisible low plants and you have very specific timing requirements to get them before a diversity of creatures do, but still; that white core in the commercial berry is more or less the structure that holds the berry to the stem in the ur-variety, and it's not really food. So I think cutting it away is entirely prudent.

[pameladean]

If I am doing a fancy strawberry thing I take out the cores; they don't have a pleasant texture and they can be a bit bitter. If I am just eating strawberries I just eat the cores too.

P.

[carbonel]

I just talked to my mother on the phone, and asked her about her strawberry-coring habits. She said (as I already knew) that she never bothered, but she has friends who do -- and that they are prettier that way. And -- of course -- that there's a tool for doing so.

[pameladean]

As you say, of course there is. Huh. I wonder if I'd do more with strawberries if I had the tool.

Probably not. I don't usually buy regular commercial strawberries, and organically raised ones are very pricy. I grew my own once, but it was impossible to get any ripe berries before the squirrels and rabbits did. Well, I could have swathed the plants in netting, but I'm not very good at doing things like that and everything tends to just fall down.

P.

[bibliofile]

The tool that the strawberry farm sells (because I live in a small city in the middle of farm country) for fifty cents has a round bottom that will scrape out the greenery plus at least a small portion of the white stuff, depending on how hard you press down. It looks like this.

[philomytha]

Yes, it's normal to find meringue shells on sale in supermarkets in the UK. They're usually shelved with stuff like sponge fingers and custard powder all year round, but when strawberries are at their best you'll often find displays of them next to strawberries as well, to encourage you to buy them all together. I've never heard of cutting the cores out of strawberries here, but the strawberries we grow here don't usually have much of the white core that you're describing.

It sounds like it will be a very nice feast!

[minnehaha]

My strawberry strategy is to remove the leaf-like tops and the core with a small knife. The "4 for a dollar" knives at the Dollar Store are quite perfect for this. I rinse first, not after.

graydon does or doesn't know that "actual strawberries" are scarcer than meringue shells in America.

K.

[sraun]

I'm with Minnehaha K on this.

[carbonel]

I have a little paring knife that was a giveaway at the State Fair some years ago. That's probably the same sort of thing.

And yes, there may be a platonic ideal of strawberries, but there's also what you can get at an American grocery, and that's what I have available. Actually, I will often substitute raspberries for strawberries if the recipe (and my finances) allow for it.

[graydon]

Graydon is entirely aware but suffers from specificity. (And has picked enough of the actual strawberries to make strawberry-rhubarb pie before now, so did not wish to imagine it impossible that carbonel had done the same.)

[minnehaha]

It is impossible to imagine cooking real strawberries. That implies such an overwhelming number of them that one can pause in the eating of them fresh, that one might have a *glut*. The "frais du bois" in France is not available in my experience of North America. Nor anything like. And I have grown my own in trying for them.

K. [has rhubarb in the garden, and the usual unimpressive strawbs at the store; could pie be far off?]

[graydon]

We had in some years enough to make jam.

Took the right weather and good luck with timing and it was a lot of squat-foraging picking, but there could be a lot of them.

[mrissa]

Yes, I hull my strawberries.

And I haunt the farmer's market for the kind described above, because they're usually there for a few weeks.

[maruad]

Strawberries? Why bother when you can make chocolate meringue cookies! One of my former co-workers would bring some into the office every couple of years and they were the best. Still, if you like strawberries, I guess the other may be worth the effort.