How to make the perfect Mont Blanc – recipe

There are several ways up western Europe’s highest mountain, but what’s the best way to make the eponymous dessert?. The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. Mont Blanc, or Monte Bianco, depending on which side you’re admiring it from, is the highest peak in western Europe, straddling the Franco-Italian border like some magnificent, icing sugar-dusted dessert. With the mountain losing 2.2 metres in height in the past three years, however, the locals take a very dim view of anyone having a go with a spoon, so if you want a taste of a dish that Nigella Lawson describes as “my favourite pudding of all time”, you’re better off making your own.

Image Credit: the Guardian [Felicity Cloake]

Happily, it’s one of those desserts that looks much more impressive than it actually is – a relatively simple confection of meringue, chantilly cream and the chestnuts that once sustained the local population and, to quote Jay Rayner, “all the good things, with a light gloss of the adult”. Simple, but guaranteed to delight anyone who scales its heights after dinner – though a bracing walk may be advisable the next morning.

Image Credit: the Guardian [Nigella Lawson’s mont blanc – her ‘favourite pudding of all time’.]

Not all Mont Blanc recipes involve meringue: Helen Goh and Yotam Ottolenghi’s book Sweet, for example, features a recipe for pastry-based Mont Blanc tarts; Taste France magazine anchors it on a shortbread biscuit; and I’m reliably informed that the Japanese prefer to build their mountains on a light sponge.

Image Credit: the Guardian [Just meringue for the base please: Henry Harris’s Mont Blanc, as featured in Jay Rayner’s book Nights Out At Home.]

But meringue is the most common choice. Rayner decries these “catch-all” Mont Blancs, with their “biscuit bases, and chocolate coverings and pastry cases and basically a load of things that I regard as entirely superfluous”. The recipe in his latest book, Nights Out at Home, which comes courtesy of chef Henry Harris of Bouchon Racine, involves two large meringues, to be divided between two people. Anne Willan’s version in her excellent 1981 collection, French Regional Cooking, makes one large, flat example, which she pipes on to a baking sheet in a spiral, a bit like the base of a pavlova. The Angelina chain, renowned for its Mont Blancs from Wuhan to New York, makes individual 6cm meringues, while maître pâtissier Christophe Michalak prefers large boules, so to speak.