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Hickory-Nut Macaroons
Take meats of hickory-nuts, pound fine and add mixed ground spice and nutmeg; make frosting as for cakes, stir meats and spices in, putting in enough to make it convenient to handle; flour the hands and make the mixture into balls the size of nutmegs, lay them on buttered tins, giving room to spread, and bake in a quick oven.
A two-ingredient meringue cookie in disguise: the "frosting as for cakes" is the entire batter, and everything depends on getting it stiff enough to hold a ball. Buckeye Cookery assumes you already know its own icing recipe, so the proportions have to be reconstructed.
- "Frosting as for cakes"In books of this period that generally means a raw egg-white icing: roughly one egg white beaten stiff with about 1 cup sifted confectioners' or finely powdered sugar. Start with that ratio, then add nuts until the mass is stiff enough to roll, adding more sugar if it stays slack.
- Hickory nutsShagbark hickory meats are small, oily and sweet, close to a pecan but firmer. Pecans are the honest substitute; walnuts read as more bitter. Pound rather than pulverize in a processor, which turns oily nuts to paste.
- "Mixed ground spice"Nineteenth-century shorthand for a house blend of cinnamon, clove, allspice and mace. About 1/2 teaspoon of blend plus 1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg per egg white is in period character.
- Size of nutmegsRoughly 3/4 inch across, so a rounded teaspoon of mixture per ball. They spread modestly; two inches between them is enough.
- OvenA "quick oven" is usually reckoned at roughly 400-425F, hot enough to scorch a sugar-and-egg-white dough before the center sets. Meringue-based nut drops of this kind do far better at 325F for 15-20 minutes, until the surfaces are dry and just barely colored.
- Buttered tinsButter on the sheet encourages these to spread and stick as the sugar caramelizes at the edges. Parchment solves the problem outright and lets them lift off clean once cooled.
- Flouring the handsKeep this. The dough is tacky, and a light dusting of flour or powdered sugar on the palms is the only way to roll it without losing half to your fingers.
- YieldOne egg white's worth makes about 18-24 balls. They keep a week in a tin and turn soft and chewy after the first day, which is not a fault.
Hickory nuts were a gathered crop rather than a bought one across the Ohio Valley, where Buckeye Cookery has its roots: the book began as an Ohio church-society collection, The Buckeye Cookbook of Marysville, Ohio, and the 1877 Buckeye Cookery was issued from Minneapolis; shagbark and shellbark hickories grew wild in farm woodlots, and shelling them was winter evening work for children. That free abundance explains why hickory appears here where a coastal cookbook would call for almonds or coconut. The name "macaroon" is used loosely: the true macaroon is an almond-paste confection, but by the later nineteenth century American books applied the word to almost any small, chewy, sugar-bound nut cookie. The reliance on the reader knowing the book's cake frosting is typical of the period, when a cookbook was read straight through as a system rather than dipped into for one page.