Home › The Principles of Cookery › Macaroon Jubes
Macaroon Jubes
Blanch, dry, and pound six ounces of sweet almonds, and mix together eight ounces of powdered sugar, and a tea-spoonful of powdered cinnamon. Stir these with the frothed whites of four eggs to a paste. Butter some baking-tins, spread the paste thinly over, and bake in a slow oven. When done to a pale colour, and while still hot, mould them round a stick about an inch and a half in diameter. Remove them when cool to a canister to keep crisp.
A thin almond macaroon batter baked as sheets and curled while hot — closer to a tuile or cigarette russe than to a domed macaroon. Everything depends on shaping them in the few seconds before they set.
- The hinge: shape while hotThese stiffen as they cool and will snap rather than bend. Bake one tray at a time, lift the sheet off with a thin palette knife the moment it comes out, and roll it round the stick immediately. If a piece hardens before you get to it, a few seconds back in the oven softens it again.
- A slow ovenRoughly 300F/150C (period 'slow' covers about 275-325F). The point is to dry the sheets to a pale biscuit colour without browning the almonds, which may take somewhere around 12-18 minutes depending on how thinly you spread. Colour, not the clock, tells you when.
- AlmondsSix ounces of blanched almonds pounded to a paste can be replaced with 6 oz (about 1¾ cups) ground almonds or almond flour. If you do pound your own, work in a spoonful of the egg white to stop the almonds oiling into marzipan.
- Powdered sugarIn nineteenth-century usage 'powdered sugar' generally means finely ground granulated or pounded loaf sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Caster sugar is the closest match; 8 oz is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons.
- Frothed whitesBeat the four whites to a soft froth, not stiff peaks — you are making a spreadable paste, and an over-beaten meringue will hold air that puffs and cracks. Fold rather than stir if the mixture seems airy.
- Spread thinlyButter the tins and, better, line them with parchment; thin almond batter welds itself to bare metal. Spread to about 1/16 inch in rounds or rectangles of 3-4 inches, well apart.
- The stickAn inch and a half across is thicker than a typical broom handle or wine-bottle neck; a wooden dowel of that diameter is the surest match. Wipe it between batches so butter does not build up.
- Yield and storageYield will depend entirely on how thinly you spread; expect several dozen curls. The canister is not optional -- almond biscuits this thin go leathery within hours in a damp kitchen. Airtight, with the lid down, they keep a week.
"Jubes" may be a compositor's slip for "tubes," a name that would describe exactly what the recipe produces: flat macaroon sheets rolled round a stick into cylinders — though it might equally point to jujube confectionery. Curled almond wafers of this kind belong to the confectioner's repertoire rather than the plain cook's — they are the same family as the French tuile and cigarette russe, made from little more than almonds, sugar and egg white, and were valued for dressing ices and creams at dessert, where a hollow tube could be filled with whipped cream or piled into a pyramid. That a general household dictionary carried the recipe at all reflects how much late-Victorian middle-class entertaining borrowed from professional pastry work.