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To make fancy biscuits
Take one pound of almonds, one pound of sugar, and some orange flower water. Pound the almonds very fine, and sprinkle them with orange flower water; when they are perfectly smooth to the touch, put them in a small pan, with flour sifted through a silk sieve; put the pan on a slow fire, and dry the paste till it does not stick to the fingers; move it well from the bottom to prevent its burning; then take it off, and roll it into small round fillets, to make knots, rings, &c. and cut into various shapes; make an iceing of different colours, dip one side of them in it, and set them in it, and set them on wire gratings to drain. They may be varied by strewing over them colored pistachios, or colored almonds, according to fancy.
An almond-paste confection from the confectioner's side of the kitchen rather than the baker's: nothing here is baked, only dried, shaped and iced. The original assumes you know when to stop, so the judgement calls are worth spelling out.
- The hinge: dry the paste, do not cook itThe pan goes on the lowest possible heat and the paste is worked constantly until it stops tacking to the fingers. If it colours or the sugar begins to catch, the almonds turn oily and the paste will crumble instead of rolling.
- Grinding the almondsPounding a pound of almonds by hand is a long job. A food processor does it in minutes, but pulse the almonds with some of the sugar from the start — sugar absorbs the oil and keeps the mass from turning to almond butter.
- The flour is unmeasuredNo quantity is given, and the amount genuinely depends on how wet your paste is. The recipe puts the sifted flour in the pan with the almonds; use only enough to bring the paste to a firm, non-sticky roll — likely somewhere under a cup for this batch.
- Orange flower waterOrange flower waters vary widely in strength, and modern commercial bottles can be very concentrated. Start with a teaspoon or two; more than that and the biscuits taste of soap.
- SugarFor a smooth paste use caster or icing sugar rather than granulated. Period recipes assumed loaf sugar pounded and sifted very fine, which is closer to caster than to anything coarse.
- "Iceing of different colours"A stiff royal icing — egg white beaten with sifted icing sugar to a thick, just-pourable consistency — is the likely intention. Use modern food colouring; some of the mineral-based greens, yellows and reds sold to nineteenth-century confectioners were genuinely poisonous.
- Drying, not draining"Wire gratings" is a cooling rack. Leave the iced knots and rings uncovered at room temperature for several hours until the icing is hard to the touch, then layer between parchment.
- Yield and keepingA pound each of almonds and sugar makes roughly 50 to 70 small shapes. In an airtight tin they keep for two or three weeks and improve after a day, as the paste firms.
These belong to the long European tradition of marzipan work — the marchpane of Tudor banquets and the massepain of French confectioners — in which ground almonds and sugar served as an edible modelling clay for the dessert table. What distinguishes the recipe from a plain marzipan is that the paste is dried over heat with a little flour, which stiffens it enough to be rolled into fillets and tied into knots and rings, and then finished with coloured icing and chopped pistachios. Sugar sculpture and coloured sweetmeats were the confectioner's proper craft rather than the cook's, and their appearance in a household receipt book reflects the nineteenth-century ambition to reproduce professional dessert work at home. Orange flower water, distilled from bitter orange blossom and imported largely from the Mediterranean, was the standard perfume for almond confectionery long before vanilla extract became cheap and common.