On the design of meringues (nom)
January 28, 2010
naturally, everyone who has seen Helvetica and Objectified is knowledgeable about design.
I love realizing that almost anything around you has been thought up and manufactured by someone. Just imagine, somewhere on this earth there is at least one person who does nothing all day but operate the fascinating machine that produces the little nets they put oranges in and an engineer who thought up and made that machine.
Although it’s not always apparent, all things around you have also been designed, not in the sense of how something works but how it looks. Sometimes this has been done consciously, sometimes without the designer at hand realising it. This last group is very interesting to look at, because the design process is then steered not by creative thinking but by what things looks like at that moment and what is unconsciously percieved to be beautiful.
Mom has, as long as I can remember, made meringues, a simple dessert made by beating eggwhites and sugar, putting that on a plate in little heaps and drying them in the oven for a few hours. The recipe has never changed: they’ve always been deliciously sweet, crunchy on the outside and mellow on the inside. What has changed, is the shape of the meringues, the way they are put on the plate. They have, along with the perception of what is beautiful, evolved. The first meringues I can remember (probably from around 1996) had this shape:
They are quite complicated and baroque compared to what is perceived as beautiful nowadays.
Later (2000-2004) the design simplified, less rococo, a smooth surface but still somewhat symetric and artificial:
And this is the way the meringues nowadays look:
They are now as unartificial as possible, thrown from afar on to the parchment paper and put in the oven without too much tampering. They look completely different from the ones I remember giving me my first toothaches.
It’s fun to see trends in things were no one would bother to look for them, but it also means everything manufactured by man will once look dated and old. Reminds you of the impermanence of things…
Then again, if you eat them, no one will ever know.
