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Macaroon Biscuits
This delicate almond biscuit is easily made by experienced hands, but home-made delicate pastry is seldom so successful as when purchased of a respectable baker. After blanching and drying the almonds (a few bitter, say eight or nine, with half a pound of sweet ones), pound them in a mortar, with the whites of eggs added sparingly from time to time, and beaten previously to a firm froth. When well pounded and mixed, beat in also by degrees, six ounces of the finest sifted sugar, with the white of another egg or two, until the mixture is of the consistency required, then drop it through a biscuit-funnel upon sheets of wafer-paper, and bake in a moderate oven for about eighteen minutes. A strip of almond may be put on the top of each cake. Probable cost, 2s. for this quantity.
The method is sound almond-macaroon practice, but the ingredient list puts this one out of reach: bitter almonds are the flavouring, and they are the problem.
- Bitter almonds are the reason to stopBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted, which is what pounding in a mortar with egg white does. Estimates of a lethal adult dose are usually put at several dozen nuts, with children at risk from considerably fewer; the eight or nine here are spread across a whole batch, so the dose per biscuit is small, but this is still not an ingredient to handle casually. Bitter almonds are barred from retail sale in the United States and restricted elsewhere for this reason.
- Baking does not fix itSome of the cyanide is volatile and lost in the oven, but the loss is partial and impossible to gauge in a domestic kitchen. A batch of small biscuits baked briefly cannot be assumed to have shed it. If you want almond macaroons, use a current recipe built on sweet almonds alone.
- What the bitter almonds were doingThey supplied benzaldehyde, the compound the Victorian palate recognised as "almond". Modern almond extract delivers the same aroma from synthesised or cassia-derived benzaldehyde with none of the glycoside — which is why nineteenth-century recipes call for bitter nuts and twentieth-century ones do not.
- Wafer paperThe edible starch sheets the biscuits are dropped onto are still sold for cake decorating and confectionery. They were used because macaroon paste sticks ferociously to a bare tin; the paper bakes on and is eaten with the biscuit.
- Biscuit-funnelA metal cone with a nozzle, used to pipe the paste. Cassell's is describing piped rounds rather than spooned mounds.
- "A moderate oven" and the cost"Moderate" in this period is usually reckoned at somewhere in the region of 350F, though the book gives no figure and period ovens varied; the eighteen minutes stated is credible for small piped macaroons. The "probable cost, 2s." is two shillings, a genuine expense at the time and a reminder that almonds and refined sugar were costly goods.
Almond macaroons are often said to have reached English kitchens from Italy and France, where maccherone and macaron both described a paste-based confection long before either meant a sandwich cookie, though the line of descent and the etymology are both contested. The insistence on a proportion of bitter almonds is characteristic of Victorian confectionery, where ratafia and macaroon biscuits, orgeat, and almond-flavoured creams all leaned on the bitter nut for the aroma we now buy in a small brown bottle. Equally characteristic is the opening admission that the reader would do better to buy these from a respectable baker: Cassell's was written for households where fine pastry was still a professional trade.