Strawberries and cream meets Eton mess, using just a single egg white and past-its-best summer fruit – a towering success
J
ust a single egg white can be transformed into enough elegant meringue shards to crown more than four servings of pudding, as I discovered when, earlier this year, I was invited by Cole & Mason to come up with a recipe to mark London History Day and decided to do so by celebrating the opening of the Shard in 2012. Meringue shards make a lovely finishing touch to all kinds of desserts, from a rich trifle to an avant-garde pavlova or that timeless classic, the Eton mess. As for the leftover yolk, I have several recipes, including spaghetti carbonara (also featuring salt-cured egg yolks that make a wonderful alternative to parmesan) and brown banana curd.
Architect Renzo Piano is said to have sketched his original idea for the Shard on the back of a restaurant napkin. Similarly, whenever I design a more conceptual dish such as this one, I love to start by drawing it in my sketchbook, to develop an idea of what the dish will look like, and while I was drawing the angular lines of the Shard, it reminded me of a minimalist dessert I’d eaten at the seminal AT restaurant in Paris that featured grey meringue shards that seemed to me to perfectly emulate the dramatic geometry of that iconic London building.
