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MASSEPAIN (called also Marchpane and Marzipan)
Take eight ounces of blanched and skinned almonds, dry them, and pound them up with one ounce of vanilla-flavoured sugar, and a table-spoonful of kirsch, and pass through a sieve. Cook four ounces of sugar in a saucepan until it forms bubbles; mix the almonds with it, and dry the paste, stirring it with a spoon until it clings to the saucepan; then remove it and put it on a marble slab sprinkled with icing sugar. When cold, knead it with the hands to make it smooth. If it is wished to model flowers or fruit in this sugar, one-sixth of its weight in adragant gum (gum-traga-canth) must be mixed and kneaded with it. All sorts of fancy sugar-work for ornamentation can be made of massepain.
A classic French-style almond paste made by cooking sugar to a syrup and working it into pounded almonds. The whole thing turns on the sugar stage and on keeping the almonds dry.
- The sugar stage is the hinge"Cook four ounces of sugar in a saucepan until it forms bubbles" points to a boiled syrup rather than dry caramel, though the recipe gives neither a temperature nor a stage name and does not mention water. Read it as a syrup and judge it by eye in the pan; any modern temperature equivalent is an interpretation, not the book's instruction.
- Blanching and dryingBlanched and skinned almonds must be genuinely dry before pounding or the paste turns oily and greyish. Spread them on a tray in a 200F/95C oven for fifteen to twenty minutes and let them cool completely first.
- Pounding without a mortarA food processor does the work of the mortar, but pulse in short bursts. Continuous running heats the nuts and drives out oil, which gives you almond butter rather than a workable paste.
- Vanilla-flavoured sugarCaster sugar kept in a jar with a split vanilla pod, not vanilla extract. One ounce is about two tablespoons.
- KirschClear cherry brandy, still widely sold. A tablespoon is there for flavour and pliability; kirsch-free versions use a teaspoon of rosewater or water instead, though the paste will be a shade stiffer.
- The marble slabMarble is used because it pulls heat out of the hot paste quickly. A cold baking sheet or a granite worktop dusted with icing sugar serves the same purpose.
- Gum tragacanthStill sold for sugarcraft, usually as a powder; one-sixth by weight is a large proportion, so for modelling work add it gradually until the paste holds a sharp edge. Modern equivalents are gum paste powder or CMC/tylose, used at far smaller doses, so follow the packet rather than the fraction given here.
- Yield and keepingRoughly 13 oz of paste, enough to cover a small cake or to model a couple of dozen fruits. Wrapped airtight it keeps several weeks at cool room temperature; refrigeration makes it sweat.
Massepain, marchpane and marzipan are the same word travelling through French, English and German, and its origin is genuinely disputed — it is variously traced to Arabic, to Italian dialect, and to the name of a coin or the box that held the sweetmeat. Almond paste reached northern European tables through Mediterranean trade in almonds and cane sugar, and by the Tudor period marchpane was a fixture of the English banquet course: a stiff disc of almond paste, gilded and iced, brought out with the wine and comfits at the end of a feast. That ornamental use is exactly what is being described here — this is a confectioner's working material, the base for moulded fruits, flowers and cake covering rather than a dish in itself. The addition of gum tragacanth, a plant exudate long used by apothecaries and confectioners as a binder, is what turns an edible paste into something that will hold a modelled petal.