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ALMOND PASTE (to Make Quickly)
Pound as many almonds as are required, moistening with white of egg to prevent oiling, and then roll them with a rolling-pin until they are smooth. They will be nicer if they have been kept in a warm place. This quickly-made almond paste is very useful for garnishing pastry.
A three-line method for a paste that most books turn into a half-page production. The whole point is speed, so the only real decisions are how you grind and how much egg white you add.
- The hinge: keep it just moistEgg white is added drop by drop, purely to stop the almonds releasing their oil under pressure. Too much and you have a sticky batter that will not roll; add it a teaspoon at a time and stop as soon as the mass coheres.
- There is no sugar hereThis is unsweetened almond paste, not marzipan. The recipe describes it only as "useful for garnishing pastry." If you want something sweet enough to eat on its own, you want a marzipan recipe with sugar or syrup.
- AlmondsBlanched sweet almonds are the likeliest intention, though the recipe does not say so; slip the skins off after a minute in hot water and dry them. Ready-ground almonds work and skip the pounding, but the paste will be drier and needs slightly more egg white.
- Warm the nuts, gently"Kept in a warm place" implies no more than gentle warmth; the recipe gives no temperature. Keep well away from oven heat, which will drive out oil and give a greasy, separated paste.
- Food processor instead of mortarPulse in short bursts and stop the moment it clumps; continuous running heats the nuts and oils them, exactly what the egg white is there to prevent. The rolling-pin stage is still worth doing on a cool surface to finish the texture smooth.
- ProportionsThe recipe gives none. As a working guide, one large egg white will bring roughly 8 oz (225 g) of almonds together, and you will rarely need all of it.
- Raw egg whiteIf the paste is going onto pastry that then bakes, the egg is cooked and no more need be said. For decoration applied to something already baked and served without further heat, use pasteurised egg white.
- KeepingWrap tightly and refrigerate; use within a couple of days. Unsweetened paste has no sugar to preserve it and the nut oil turns quickly once the almonds are ground.
Almond paste sits at the root of English confectionery: ground almonds and sugar, sometimes bound with egg white, were the basis of medieval and early modern "marchpane", moulded, gilded and set out as a banquet subtlety long before it became a layer under wedding-cake icing. What Cassell's offers here is the workaday descendant, stripped of sugar and made in minutes for a pastry cook who needs a pliable material to cut leaves and rosettes from. The instruction to warm the almonds and moisten with egg white is the traditional answer to the oldest problem with almonds, which is that pounding them in a mortar for any length of time turns them to oil rather than powder.