A Delicious Mess

Eton Mess

Eton mess is a traditional English dessert consisting of a mixture of strawberries, pieces of meringue and cream, which is traditionally served at Eton College's annual cricket game against the students of Winchester College.  The dish has been known by this name since the 19th century and was originally made with either strawberries or bananas mixed with ice-cream or cream.

The word mess may refer to the appearance of the dish, or may be used in the sense of "a quantity of food", particularly "a prepared dish of soft food" or "a mixture of ingredients cooked or eaten together". A popular, though thought to be untrue, myth is that Eton mess was first created when a meringue dessert was dropped accidentally, but what could be salvaged was, and it was served as a crushed meringue with strawberries and cream.  Whatever the reason it was created, it is a delicious bit of mess.

Light, airy and slightly sweetened cream mixed with berries and pomegranate is the perfect end to a heavy meal.  The balance of crunchiness from the meringue with chocolate chips is a perfect touch.  Whip it up in no time for unexpected guests for what seems to be an extravagant dessert.

Therapeutic topic of the week:

Stress and food intake. You really do crave rich foods when stress is unrelenting. And a very special and well-meaning collaboration between your brain and your body makes you do it. We seek chocolate, ice cream or napoleons, scientists have discovered, not just because they taste good. It's actually the body's attempt to put a brake on the runaway machinery of chronic stress. "One of the functions of stress hormones is to move energy around," explains Norman Pecoraro, Ph.D, a postdoctoral fellow on the San Francisco team. The escalating levels of cortisol released in chronic stress usher the excess calories straight to your abdomen, where they get deposited as fat. By virtue of its location, abdominal fat has privileged access to the liver. That allows it to be quickly mobilized for energy.

Here's the mark of the body's brilliance. Those fat deposits are absolutely crucial. They send out some metabolic signal that feeds back to the brain, telling it to shut off the stress response. Those who eat cream puffs and chocolate are trying to give the body what it needs to dampen output from their stress system, Pecoraro says. "Eating seems to ameliorate some of the symptoms of depression, so you won't feel as anxious. This seems to be the body's way of telling the brain, 'It's OK, you can relax, you're refueled with high-energy food.'"

The catch is, consumption of calorie-rich foods may make us feel better and function better, but it's bad for long-term health. The stresses we face today are not like the eat-or-be-eaten stresses we faced when our bodies evolved. Nowadays we're up against long-term job insecurity and romantic rejection. The stress goes on and on and we feel immobilized by it. The energy reserves do not get used up.

There is a way out, Pecoraro says. There are other ways to shut off chronic stress. There's exercise, yoga, meditation, hot baths and, yes, sex. They all stimulate the same pleasure centers in the brain that make us seek comfort food. Relaxation techniques may work even earlier in the process, by reducing the psychological perception of stress in the first place.

"In the short term, if you're chronically stressed it might be worth eating and sleeping a little more to calm down, perhaps at the expense of gaining a few pounds," says Pecoraro. "But seeking a long-term solution in comfort food—rather than fixing the source of the stress or your relationship to the source of the stress—is going to be bad for you."

Written by Hara Estroff Marano, published on November 21, 2003.  Original article published in Psychology Today.

Eton Mess Recipe

Ingredients
2 cups strawberries

1 cup raspberries

1/2 cup pomegranate seeds
2 teaspoons sugar
2 teaspoons pomegranate molasses
2 cups whipping cream
1 package of chocolate chip meringue cookies (store bought or homemade)

Directions
Hull and chop the strawberries and put into a bowl with raspberries and pomegranate seeds.  Add the sugar and pomegranate molasses and leave to macerate while you whip the cream.

Whip the cream in a large bowl until thick but still soft. Roughly crumble in a few of the meringues cookies - you will need chunks for texture as well as a little fine dust.

Take out about half a cupful of the chopped fruit, and fold the meringue cream and rest of the fruit mixture together.

Arrange in four glasses or in a mound, and top each with some of the remaining macerated fruit.