English dessert

One of the most British things on

Earth: eton mess.

By "mess" the Brits mean a big

Mixture of food: strawberries, whipped cream and crumpled up meringue cookies.

And of course by "cookies". I mean biscuits. It's a cafeteria classic from Eton College — by college, of course, the Brits mean public school, and by public school, of course, they mean private school. It's posh schoolboy food. I'm going to show you four slightly different ways of making it plus one very different way. The meringue you want to make the day before. A couple eggs in a mixing bowl.

Fish out the yolks. Some people are grossed out about it, but this is increasingly my favorite way to separate eggs. You have a lot more control and you're less likely to puncture the egg on its shell. For the traditional recipe, you don't use the yolks at all, so save those for something else. A shake of cream of tartar in there to stabilize the foam — or a few drops of lemon would do instead. Beat until you've got a stiff foam, like that. Just takes a couple minutes. For a baked meringue you generally want 25 or 30 grams of sugar per white.

So I've got 50g, half a cup of granulated sugar that I'm gradually beating in. With this much sugar, there is a risk you could collapse the foam if you put it all in at once. Beat some more until it's nice and stiff. Maybe give it a tiny pinch of salt for flavor and a splash of vanilla, and that's done. To make these pretty you'd normally squeeze the batter out of a piping bag with a star tip on the end. But we're literally just gonna crumple these up, so I'm spooning out dollops. You still have to bake them as distinct cookies or maybe as long, narrow strips. If you just tried to bake it as a single blob it would not have enough surface area — it wouldn't be crunchy enough.

Now I made these with granulated sugar — Brits would might use caster sugar, which is kinda halfway between granulated and powdered sugar. I can't buy caster sugar here, but some people do use powdered sugar for meringue and I'm curious if it'll make any difference so I'm doing this all again with about 2/3 of a cup powdered sugar — it's less dense, so you need slightly greater volume for the same weight —50 or 60g. Interestingly, it's less stiff at this stage than the one we did with granulated sugar. We seem to have lost more air. That surprises me — I would think bigger sugar grains would have punctured more bubbles, but maybe the tiny particles are actually more disruptive to the bubble structure. No idea, but we'll see how they bake up. And for one other experiment I'm going to make some chocolate meringues. Same exact recipe, except at the end you work in a couple teaspoons of cocoa powder per egg.

These are gonna be good enough to eat on their own. Certainly you can just buy meringue cookies instead, but those are not as common in stores where I live as they are along the Themes. Bake at real low temperature, 225ºF/110ºC.

Powdered sugar meringues are on the r

I mean, top.

Chocolate on the bottom. Bake for an hour, hour and a half, until the don't look wet anymore. They should still look shiny, but not wet. Then, ideally, you just turn off the heat and leave them to cool down and dry out.

Just go to bed. Goodnight. Here they are the next day. Granulated sugar — these ones look surprisingly nice as simple dollops. Nice, open texture inside. The ones with powdered sugar do not look as nice, and they do not taste as nice. Super dense. I'm shocked.

The chocolate ones are awesome, of course. The cocoa powder gives them a moister, chewier texture, like gluten-free brownies. Not traditional for Eton Mess, but I'm not a Brit. I'm just imitating one on the internet. Hey, is anybody imitating me on the internet? Let's check with Aura, the sponsor of this video. True story. One time I got this voicemail, and this scary voice said, "Adam, I like your videos, but I found this private information about you, so you'd better send me a thousand bitcoin," as though I have any idea how to do that. My wife got a similar voicemail but he forgot how to turn on his little voice transformer and realized that halfway through and went "oh, crap" and then hung up.

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Anyway, when the meringues are dry you

Just crumple them, as fine or as chunky as you want them.

The finer you make the crumbs the faster they're gonna dissolve in the dish, so I'd lean toward big chunks.

The plurality of the bulk of the dish is generally whipped cream, so whip up plenty of cream. You won't need this much, I'm making a lot because I'm doing a lot of experiments. It always looks like nothing is happening, but wait five minutes, the membranes on the fat globules bust open, they tangle and form a mesh and boom, whipped cream. People generally mix at least a little sugar into this, along with some vanilla, making this chantilly cream. But the other elements of the dish are sweet too, so I say make the cream a little under-sweet on its own. Hey, for once I didn't over-whip it. I like when it's super silky like that. If you take it any further it starts to get kinda rough and cheesy.

So, strawberries. You can use all kinds of berries, but strawberries are the tradition. I'll cut off all the calyxs — that can't be the plural of calyx. But for this first version I'm going to slice them. I want reasonably thin pieces because I'm not gonna mash or cook these. I'm just gonna macerate them — scatter in a couple spoonfuls of sugar, depending on how sweet the strawberries already are. And if you want, you can do some booze. I'll do a drop of gin.

Then you just let that sit for awhile and the sugar will break the strawberries down a bit and form a syrup about them — like that. So, the way I'm sure they did this back at the Eton cafeteria was in one big batch. Cream, strawberries and their juices — the proportions are up to you — and then some meringue crumbles. You have to wait to mix that together until right before you eat, because the meringue is gonna start dissolving immediately. Dose out individual bowls and eat. I absolutely love the contrast between crunchy, marshmallowy meringue and the soft cream. But I feel like I'm not getting enough strawberry from the macerated strawberries. Maybe that'd work if you have really good, perfectly in-season strawberries, but I do not.

So for version #2, I'm going to quarter the strawberries — I want somewhat bigger chunks. And then two thirds of the strawberries I will put into some narrow vessel, throw in a couple spoons of sugar, and then blitz, as the Brits would say. If you don't have blender you could just mash them real good with the back of a fork. Once smooth, I'll throw in my one third of intact strawberry quarters for some textural contrast, and let's try mixing that into the cream. I think I like about two parts cream to two part strawberries by volume, and then about one part meringue chunks. The reason I'm gently folding these together isn't to keep the foam from collapsing. It won't — we established that in a recent video. You could just stir it until homogenous but I don't want it homogenous.

I want elegant pink streaks running through it.

Gorgeous.

And the taste is far superior. I'm just getting way more strawberry from the pureed strawberries. The presentation, all mixed up together — that's school-lunch-erific, but let's try the more elegant option which is to layer the ingredients in a glass, parfait-style. I think I could have made that look a little nicer. But I like having the dry meringue chunks on the top — great crunch, and you can mix everything up yourself as you eat, which is kinda fun. I guess that was version #3.

Version #4 is gonna start much the same way — quartered strawberries. This time I will use a little lime juice for extra acid. Not necessary. And I'm gonna grab two third of the strawberries and cook them, with maybe half of that lime juice, some sugar, and a little spoon of starch. Stir, and the moisture that comes out of the berries should be enough to dissolve and disperse everything. But if you're cooking this and it seems a little too dry, like stuff is gonna burn, you could throw in some water — or gin. And cook until the starch has visibly gelatinized and the berries are soft enough to mash. You could use the stick blender again, but this will be chunkier.

You gotta chill this all the way down, and then you can mix in the remain strawberry quarters. We want to preserve their freshness. A small spoon is really the safest way to get the cream into the glass without smudging the sides. Drop in a little at time. I think the key to getting clean layers is gonna be to make them really thick. Plenty of cream, plenty of meringue, a thick band strawberries on top, more cream, top with the meringue to preserve crunch. Yep, this version is the winner, for me. I love the velvety, jam-like texture we get from the cornstarch and from the cooked berries, and we still get fresh flavor and texture from the raw berries.

I could do without the lime juice, though. To someone of my general demographic, strawberry + lime or lemon really does taste like Kool-Aid. OK, what if you don't want to waste the egg yolks? Well, you could make pastry cream. Two yolks, a tablespoon of starch, a teaspoon of flour, quarter cup of sugar (50g), splash of vanilla, maybe a pinch of salt and then just enough milk at first get you a very thick paste. It's easier to whisk lumps out of a thick paste. People use much more elaborate mixing procedures to avoid lumps, I think this is fine. A whole cup of milk is in there now, 237mL, and I just turn my heat on high and bring this to a boil while whisking constantly. This is not the safest way to do it but it is the easiest.

All of a sudden, it'll thicken. I might have a few little lumps in there but who cares. Make sure it's actually boiling before you stop — egg yolk thickens at a lower temperature, the starch needs to actually boil. Heat off, work in a couple tablespoons of butter and then chill all the way down. Then you can mix that with equal parts whipped cream to yield creme diplomate, my new favorite thing. Some people put dissolved gelatin in this to thicken it up some more but I don't think that's necessary. Into this somewhat more robust base I am going to put my chocolate meringues, and some sliced bananas. Apparently Eton mess was originally made with bananas.

This is not Eton mess, but it is real good. This recipe and my favorite of the traditional strawberry recipes are what you will find in the description. Either way, don't feel pressured to layer a fancy parfait in a glass. You can just mix it up. Remember — it's school lunch...