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Italian Macaroons
Blanch and pound eight ounces of sweet almonds (expose them to the air for a day or two before they are required to be pounded) with a little orange-flower water, one pound of sifted sugar, and the frothed whites of three eggs. Smooth the ingredients by rubbing them well together, and add very gradually the frothed whites. When the paste looks soft and smooth, drop it, in quantities about the size of a walnut, through a funnel on to some wafer-paper. Bake on the ordinary plate, in a rather slow oven, to a pale colour. A strip or two of almond should be stuck on the top of each macaroon before baking. Time, fifteen to twenty minutes to bake. Probable cost, 1s. 8d. per pound.
A plain almond-and-egg-white macaroon of the old school, closer to an Italian amaretto than to a Parisian macaron. The hinge is the paste: it must be worked to a smooth, soft mass before the last of the whites goes in, or the biscuits spread and crack.
- Drying the almondsBlanched almonds spread out for a day or two lose surface moisture so they pound to a paste rather than a wet sludge. If you are using a food processor instead of a mortar, pulse them with a spoonful of the weighed sugar to stop them turning to butter.
- The proportionsEight ounces of almonds to a full pound of sugar is a two-to-one sugar ratio, far sweeter than most modern amaretti. It is not an error, and the sugar is what gives the crisp shell, but you can expect a markedly sweet biscuit.
- Orange-flower waterUse the real distilled kind, and use it sparingly, no more than a teaspoon; it turns soapy quickly.
- Whites "frothed"This means beaten to a loose foam, not stiff peaks. Add them a spoonful at a time; you may not need all three, and the paste should hold its shape when dropped.
- Wafer-paperSold now as edible rice paper or wafer paper, still available from baking suppliers. It bakes onto the base of the biscuit and is eaten with it; parchment works if you cannot find it, though the bottoms will be flatter.
- "Through a funnel"A piping bag with a plain half-inch nozzle. Walnut-sized means roughly a rounded tablespoon, spaced well apart on the tray.
- "The ordinary plate" and "rather slow oven"The plate is the flat baking sheet, not a dish. A rather slow oven is usually taken as somewhere around 275-300F/140-150C; the fifteen to twenty minutes given suits roughly that heat, and the macaroons should stay pale, drying more than browning.
- Yield and keepingExpect around thirty to thirty-five biscuits. Cool completely on the tray, then store airtight; they soften within a day in humid air and crisp again in a low oven.
Almond macaroons long predate the sandwiched, coloured macaron most people now picture: the older biscuit is simply ground almonds, sugar and egg white, a confection that spread through Italian and French convent and confectioner's kitchens and is generally traced to the medieval marzipan tradition of the Mediterranean. Cassell's calls these "Italian", and the style is plain, pale, unfilled, studded with a sliver of almond. The wafer-paper base appears in domestic manuals by the later nineteenth century, when sugar had become cheap enough for a household cook to use a pound of it in one batch of biscuits; the "probable cost, 1s. 8d. per pound" is a reminder that these dictionaries were written for mistresses costing out a kitchen as much as for the person doing the pounding.