Celebrating Heritage British Food & Cooking
Eton Mess is a traditional English dessert. Made from whipped cream, meringue and summer fruits, it is really easy to make.
Eton College
The dish comes from Eton College which is a private boys-only boarding school near Windsor founded by King Henry VI in 1440. The Mess is the traditional dessert at the annual cricket match between Eton and Harrow School since 1893. Eton Mess celebrates the end of the school year.
Alumni
Royalty, prime ministers (18 in total), actors, poets, authors and clergy have all been educated at Eton. This includes notables like the Duke of Wellington (he beat Napolean at Waterloo) and Princes William and Harry. These along with Prime Ministers David Cameron and Boris Johnson, Hugh Laurie, Christopher Lee and even Bear Grylls.
Eton has a royal charter that gives 70 boys, known as Poor Boys, an education free of charge. The rest pay up to £48,500 per year.
Canteen
I don’t know about poor boys, the school’s canteen has appeared on social media serving confit duck, fig and goats cheese salad and peri-peri chicken. Also on offer are rustic cheeseboards and a charcuterie platter. Not a chicken nugget in sight.
What a Mess
With such sophisticated, some might say posh, food on offer it seems surprising that Eton Mess consists of broken meringue, chopped fruit and cream, basically thrown in a bowl and mixed together.
However it came about, this dessert is bright and colourful, both creamy and crunchy and a real taste of summer.
You can use any summer fruits like blackberries, blackcurrants, raspberries, whatever you fancy, I like lots of different colours. The usual choice though is strawberries.
Another summer fruit recipe you might like is Baked Raspberry Cheesecake.
Other Recipes You Maybe Interested in …..
Eton Mess
Ingredients
- 300 g Mix of strawberries and raspberries
- 4 Meringues
- 300 ml Carton whipping cream
- ½ can Carnation Light Condensed Milk
- 1 lemon juiced
- 4 tbsp Ready made raspberry or strawberry sauce
Instructions
- Chop the strawberries and lightly crush the raspberries.
- Roughly break the meringues into bite size pieces.
- Whip the cream, add the condensed milk and re-whip to soft peaks. Add the lemon juice which should thicken the mixture.
- Layer the creamy mixture with the fruit, meringue and sauce into a serving dish and enjoy!
Nutrition
You may also like one of my other recipes …
Grandads Cookbook may reference or include sections of text and images reproduced courtesy of:
- Carnation
- bestrecipes.com.au
- Wikipedia
- theguardian.com
- etoncollege.com
