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Mrs. Bedford's Chocolate Macaroons
Grate one-quarter of a pound of chocolate and mix one-quarter of a pound of sifted powdered sugar and one-quarter of a pound of blanched and ground almonds. Add a pinch of cinnamon and mix to a soft paste with eggs beaten until thick. Drop in half-teaspoonfuls on slightly buttered paper and bake in a moderate oven. Do not take from the paper until cold; then brush the under side with cold water, and the paper can be readily stripped off.--Mrs. Cornelia C. Bedford.
An almond macaroon in the older sense, bound with whole egg and stiffened with grated rather than melted chocolate. It is built on equal weights, so a scale makes it far easier than cups do.
- Equal weights, not equal cupsA quarter of a pound each of chocolate, sifted powdered sugar and ground almonds -- four ounces, about 115g, of each. Measured by volume those three come out wildly unequal, which is why the recipe is written in pounds.
- Grated, not meltedThis is the hinge. Grated unsweetened chocolate stays as solid specks and keeps the paste stiff enough to hold a dropped shape. Melt it and you have a batter that spreads into a sheet.
- "Eggs beaten until thick" -- start with oneNo count is given, because the almonds and sugar absorb differently from batch to batch. Beat a whole egg until thick and add it a little at a time, stopping as soon as the paste holds together in a soft mound. A second egg is usually more than you need.
- Blanched almonds, ground at homeAlmond flour works, but home-ground blanched almonds are coarser and give the chewier crumb this recipe is after. Do not substitute almond meal made with the skins on.
- The buttered paper and the cold-water trickThis is a period release method, and it genuinely works: once the macaroons are cold, brushing the back of the paper with cold water lets it peel away cleanly. Baking parchment or a silicone mat removes the need for the trick entirely.
- Wait for them to cool"Do not take from the paper until cold" is an instruction, not a suggestion. Hot from the oven they are fragile and will tear; they firm up as they cool.
- The ovenA moderate oven here is 325 to 350F, and half-teaspoonfuls will take 12 to 15 minutes. They should be set and dry on top with the inside still soft.
- The pinch of cinnamonToo little to read as a spice. It is there to lift the chocolate, in the same way a pinch of salt is used elsewhere in the book.
Before coconut captured the word in America, a macaroon meant this: ground almonds, sugar and egg, with no flour and no raising agent. The form is Italian in origin and reached English and French kitchens by the seventeenth century, and the chocolate version is a nineteenth-century confectioner's variation that suited a company like Walter Baker very well, since it uses a quarter of a pound of chocolate in a single tray of small cakes. What makes this particular booklet interesting is that it prints a second, quite different Chocolate Macaroon two pages later -- that one uses seven egg whites and no yolks, bakes on edible wafer paper, and carries no contributor's name at all. Two recipes of the same name, by different hands, a few pages apart, is a fair picture of how these advertising pamphlets were assembled: contributions were gathered and set in type rather than edited into a single house method.