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Almond Macaroons
Blanch dry ½ pound almonds, and make into a paste with 1 teaspoon rose water.
Beat 3 egg whites with ½ cup powdered sugar, adding slowly½ teaspoon almond extract. Then add the almonds, chopped fine. If very soft, add 1 tablespoon Five Roses flour. Roll in balls size of walnuts with wet hands. Flatten a little and place apart on buttered paper. A pastry tube is very useful in shaping the cakes, Bake 15 or 20 minutes in a moderate oven.
A plain almond macaroon of the old school: ground nuts, sugar, egg white, no leavening. A few of the directions assume equipment and habits that have changed.
- Moderate ovenBake at 350F. Macaroons want to dry and set rather than colour, so check at 15 minutes; they are done when the tops are pale gold and firm at the edge but still yielding in the centre.
- "Buttered paper"Parchment on a sheet pan does the same job and does not need greasing. Macaroons stick tenaciously to bare metal, so do not skip the paper.
- Blanching the almondsPour boiling water over the almonds, stand two minutes, drain and pinch off the skins, then dry them thoroughly before grinding. Damp almonds turn to oily butter in a food processor rather than a paste. Half a pound of blanched almonds is roughly 1 3/4 cups whole, or about 2 cups ground.
- "Chopped fine" and "made into a paste"The recipe asks for both, which reads as an inconsistency in the text; one way to satisfy it is to work part of the nuts with the rose water into a paste and chop the rest for texture. Pulsing the whole quantity in a processor with the rose water to a coarse, slightly damp meal gives a workable result.
- The sugar looks lowHalf a cup of powdered sugar to half a pound of almonds is much less than a modern macaroon carries, and the result is dry and distinctly nutty rather than chewy. Adding sugar will slacken the batter and you will need the flour.
- Beating the whitesBeat only to soft peaks before folding in the nuts. A stiff meringue will deflate and weep once the oily almond meal goes in, and the batter should be thick enough to hold a shape, not pourable.
- Rose water and almond extractBoth are still sold. The recipe's half teaspoon of extract is enough for this quantity; almond extract is easy to overdo.
- ShapingWet hands are the low-tech option; a piping bag with a plain half-inch tip is faster. Space them two inches apart, as they spread.
- YieldAbout two dozen walnut-sized cakes. Cool completely on the paper before lifting them, or they tear.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal, one of Canada's largest flour millers, and like most milling-company books it exists to keep the brand name in front of the cook: note the instruction to add "1 tablespoon Five Roses flour" if the batter runs soft. The macaroon itself is far older than the book. Almond-and-egg-white cakes were made in Italian and French convent kitchens by the sixteenth century, and the name is generally traced through the Italian maccherone, a word used for both pasta and these small paste cakes. The rose water here is a survival from that older tradition, when distilled flower waters rather than vanilla or extracts carried the perfume of a sweet dish.