Britain and Ireland · Volume 31, The Roast, the Crust and the Clotted Cream
Eton Mess
Berkshire
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 20 minutes
- Researched
- 9 sources cited
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Eton Mess is first documented in print in 1893, associated with the annual cricket match between Eton and Harrow. The popular tale that it began when a dog knocked over a carefully made pavlova is a fabrication, confirmed by multiple food historians as an invention dating to the 1930s, and this chapter tells it as such rather than repeating it uncritically.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 20 minutes.
Ingredients
- 4 ready-made meringue nests, or shop-bought meringue
- 300ml double cream
- 400g strawberries, hulled
- 1 tbsp caster sugar
Method
- Whip the cream to soft peaks.
- Roughly crush the meringue.
- Hull and roughly chop the strawberries, macerate briefly with the sugar.
- Fold the meringue and half the strawberries through the cream, keeping it loose and roughly mixed rather than smooth.
- Spoon into glasses, and top with the remaining strawberries.
What a modern chef changes
The cream's aeration and the fruit's own flavour both given real attention, rather than the assembly treated as an afterthought.
Kit note, not tied to a numbered rung
Method
- Whip the cream to a genuine soft peak by hand or on a slow speed, stopping well before it turns grainy, since an overwhipped cream folded through fruit and meringue turns heavy and buttery rather than staying light.
- Macerate a portion of the strawberries properly, at least 20 minutes with the sugar and a squeeze of lemon, then reduce the resulting juice separately to a light syrup in a small pan, spooning it back through at the end for a more concentrated strawberry flavour than raw fruit alone provides.
- Fold everything together at the very last moment, in front of whoever is eating it if possible, since the dish's whole appeal is textural contrast, crisp meringue against soft cream against fresh fruit, and it degrades within the hour as the meringue softens.