The Key To Making Julia Child's Most Beloved Dessert Is Patience

The legendary culinary icon Julia Child offered aspiring home chefs plenty of important kitchen tips that didn't necessarily have to do with ingredients or tools. Courage and confidence are some of the principles she preached with regularity. You'll need both — and plenty of patience — if you want to tackle the floating islands dessert, which she adored. 

Île flottante is a classic French dessert that presents baked meringue in a dish filled with crème anglaise. The plating offers an impressive visual quality, and while the recipe can take some time to put together, the list of ingredients isn't intricate or complicated. Chefs must steel themselves to make meringue, a somewhat time-consuming process to get the mixture perfect. When combined at lower speeds, egg whites and sugar can take up to 10 minutes until solid peaks form. While you can try to quickly whip the ingredients into submission in an attempt to reduce your overall prep time, quickly-made meringue is at risk of being less stable than slowly-made varieties. For a more reliable result, cooks-in-the-know — like Child — gradually add sugar and let the granules fully dissolve throughout the whipping process.

Once the meringue for your floating island is beaten and fluffed to perfection, the mixture is then placed into an oven to bake until it is noticeably glossy and springy to the touch, around 15 to 20 minutes. Before you can think about plating the creation in its creamy pool, however, you need to allow enough time for the meringue to fully cool. This can take an additional hour.

Understandably, you may be looking for shortcuts when creating floating islands to serve. You can make crème anglaise several days before serving the dessert, but meringue is best served fresh, at the most two hours after made. Thankfully, once the dessert's components are prepared, the final plating doesn't require too much additional time. Simply set the meringue into a dish of crème anglaise and top the dessert with your choice of fruit compote, roasted nuts, caramel, or cookie crumbles. Though this dish may require some patience and planning to pull off, you will have put together a dessert that Julia Child herself would surely approve of.