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Macaroons and Miscellaneous Sweets: Marshmallows
CINNAMON MACAROONS Run through a chopper one cupful of almonds, then rub into a paste, mix with an equal quantity of sugar, a tablespoonful of ground cinnamon, one-fourth cupful of finely grated chocolate, then work in carefully the whites of four eggs. Drop on greased paper, and bake in a moderate oven. MARSHMALLOWS Soak two ounces of gelatine in one-half cupful of water for an hour. Boil two cupfuls of sugar, one-half cup of water, and one-fourth teaspoonful of cream of tartar until it spins a thread. Pour the gelatine on a platter and over this pour the syrup. Beat up for twenty or thirty minutes. Flavor with a teaspoonful of vanilla, if desired, adding it just before the beating up. Pour into well greased cake tin; let stand till solid. Turn out on powdered sugar, cut in squares, and roll in powdered sugar, and keep in a closed jar or box. COCOANUT MARSHMALLOWS Take two cupfuls of sugar, add a half cupful of water and heat until the sugar is dissolved, then stir in one-half box of gelatine that has been soaked for a few hours in a little water. Let stand until partially cool, then add a pinch of salt, a teaspoonful of vanilla, a cupful and a half of shredded cocoanut, and the stiffly beaten whites of three eggs. Stir well, then pour into deep pans well dusted with corn-starch and powdered sugar. The mixture should be at least a half inch thick. Turn out on powdered sugar and corn-starch, cut into cubes, and roll in the powdered and corn-starch mixture until each marshmallow is well coated, then roll in cocoanut.
ORANGE MARSHMALLOWS Soak two ounces of gelatine in one cupful of orange juice until dissolved, then strain through cheese-cloth, put into saucepan in a pan of hot water on the stove and add one cup of sugar. Stir the mixture until it is thick and white. Heat until a little stirred on a cold plate will form a creamy ball, remove from the fire and whip into the mixture the stiffly beaten whites of three eggs. Flavor with orange extract, using about a teaspoonful. Whip with silver fork until it begins to thicken. Pour into pan well dusted with cornstarch and powdered sugar; when cool cut in squares and roll in powdered sugar.
Four recipes share this page: baked cinnamon macaroons, a gelatine-and-syrup marshmallow of the standard type, and two marshmallows that fold in uncooked egg white. The last two are the problem.
- Why the cocoanut and orange marshmallows failBoth beat stiffly whipped raw egg whites into a mixture that is explicitly partially cool (cocoanut) or taken off the fire before the whites go in (orange), then set the candy cold and keep it. Nothing in either recipe brings the whites near the 160F needed to destroy Salmonella, and a sugar-gelatine confection held at room temperature gives any surviving organisms a long, hospitable stay. Use a current recipe for egg-white marshmallows, which either cooks the whites with boiling syrup or specifies pasteurised whites.
- The plain marshmallow and the macaroonsThe first marshmallow recipe contains no egg at all, and the macaroon whites are baked. Those two carry no unusual risk; the notes below apply to them.
- "Spins a thread"Thread stage, 230-235F on a candy thermometer. Cook the sugar, water and cream of tartar without stirring once it boils, and wash any crystals off the pan sides with a wet brush.
- Two ounces of gelatineThis is by weight, not by volume: about eight of the modern quarter-ounce envelopes. Gelatine of this period was not standardised and may well have hydrated more slowly than today's granulated product, which would explain the full hour's soak. The "half box" in the cocoanut recipe is genuinely ambiguous, since box sizes were not standard.
- A moderate ovenUsually taken as somewhere around 350F. Cinnamon macaroons on greased paper will want roughly 15 to 18 minutes and should still feel slightly soft at the centre when they come out; parchment replaces the greased paper entirely.
- The almonds"Run through a chopper, then rub into a paste" is a food processor now, pulsed with some of the sugar to keep the nuts from turning oily. Commercial almond paste is not a substitute here, as it is already sweetened and bound.
- Grated chocolateProbably unsweetened block chocolate, grated fine on a rasp so it disperses rather than melting into streaks.
- Twenty or thirty minutes of beatingThat figure assumes a hand whisk or a rotary egg beater. A stand mixer with the whisk will do it in considerably less time; work it to a thick, opaque, ribboning foam that holds its shape when the whisk is lifted.
- Pan, coating and yieldAn 8-inch square tin gives a slab about an inch deep. Coat it and the cut faces with a half-and-half mixture of cornstarch and powdered sugar; sugar alone weeps. Best eaten within a week.
Marshmallow originally meant what it says: a paste made with the mucilaginous root of Althaea officinalis, the marsh mallow, which French confectioners worked into a soft white lozenge sold as much for sore throats as for pleasure. By the late nineteenth century the root had been dropped in favour of gelatine and whipped egg white, which were cheaper, more reliable and did the same job of holding air in sugar syrup, and the name outlived the plant. Home candy manuals of this era print marshmallows with some confidence, though the twenty to thirty minutes of beating shows what that confidence still cost in arm work. The cinnamon macaroons at the top of the page belong to a much older tradition, the almond-and-egg-white confection that spread from Italian and French practice across English-language cookery, and the cinnamon sits within that long-established practice rather than being a novelty.