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Pistachio Macaroons
Blanch seven ounces of pistachios and seven ounces of Jordan almonds, and pound them in a mortar to a smooth paste, adding the white of an egg--a few drops at a time. Put with these ingredients a quarter of a pound of pounded sugar, a table-spoonful of Curacoa, and a tea-spoonful of spinach-juice for colouring. When the mixture is pounded to a smooth but firm paste, form it into balls nearly an inch in diameter, and lay these on a baking-sheet. Leave a little distance between the macaroons, and bake in a gentle oven until they are hard and set. Turn them upside down, and brush the back of the baking-sheet with a little water, which will make it easier to lift off the macaroons. Keep them in a cool, dry place until wanted. Time to bake the macaroons, about twenty minutes. Probable cost, 2s. per pound.
A pounded-paste macaroon of the older sort: no whipped meringue, just nuts, sugar and enough egg white to bind. The whole outcome depends on how much white you add.
- Egg white, a few drops at a timeThe instruction to add it drop by drop is the hinge: stop as soon as the paste holds together and can be rolled without cracking, since you may not need all of the white. Too much white and the balls slump and spread into flat wafers.
- Mortar or machineA food processor does the pounding, but pulse rather than run it — pistachios and almonds both give up oil quickly and turn to butter. Grind the nuts dry first with a spoonful of the sugar, then add the white and Curaçao.
- Jordan almondsHere this means large sweet almonds of the Malaga/Jordan type, not the sugar-shelled confetti sold under that name now. Ordinary blanched whole almonds are the correct substitute; skip anything already coated.
- Blanching the pistachiosPour boiling water over shelled pistachios, stand two minutes, drain and rub off the skins in a towel. Dry them well before grinding or the paste will be slack.
- Pounded sugarA quarter pound is 4 oz (about 1/2 cup); pounded sugar is caster or superfine sugar, which dissolves into the nut paste instead of leaving grit.
- Spinach juiceThe period colouring: blanched spinach squeezed through muslin. Its purpose is to push the paste toward a truer green, since blanched pistachios are pale. A teaspoon of it is optional, and modern green food colouring does the same job with less work.
- A gentle ovenRead this as 300–325°F. These are meant to dry out and set hard rather than brown; at higher heat the nut oils scorch and the green goes khaki.
- Lifting them offWetting the underside of the hot sheet to steam the macaroons free is unnecessary if you bake on parchment. The trick was for bare tin, and for the old practice of baking macaroons on edible wafer paper.
- YieldBalls just under an inch from this quantity of paste run well past two dozen; expect several dozen. They keep a week or more in a tin; airtight and cool matters more than the original's "dry place" suggests, as the nut paste picks up moisture and softens.
Almond macaroons — nuts, sugar and egg white, no flour — reach English cookery from Italian and French confectionery, and by the nineteenth century household manuals commonly carried a rank of variations distinguished only by the nut or the flavouring: ratafia, bitter almond, cocoanut, pistachio. Pistachios were an expensive import, which is why the recipe cuts them half-and-half with almonds and then reinforces the colour with spinach juice, a standard confectioner's green of the era used for everything from pistachio cream to sugar paste leaves. The Curaçao is the same logic applied to flavour: orange liqueur was a stock sweet-kitchen bottle. The habit of quoting "probable cost" — 2s. per pound here — reflects a readership of cooks answerable to a housekeeper's accounts, for whom the price of a batch was as much a part of the recipe as the baking time.