Home › Cakes › Cocoanut Macaroons
Cocoanut Macaroons
Make a syrup of one-third cup of water and twothirds cup of sugar. Boil ten minutes. Take from fire and stir in one-half pound of Larkin Shredded Cocoanut; slowly add the beaten whites of three eggs. Mix thoroughly and drop with a spoon upon buttered tins. Bake in slow oven until slightly brown.
WHITE CAKE No. I Cream one-half cup of butter with one and onehalf cups of sugar. Add one cup of milk, two and
A simple boiled-syrup macaroon: the syrup does most of the work of binding, and the egg whites go in off the heat. Two things need watching — how far the syrup boils, and how gently the oven runs.
- Watch the syrup, not the clockOne-third cup water to two-thirds cup sugar boiled a full ten minutes on a modern burner may well reach the firm-ball stage (around 245F) or beyond, depending on the pan and the heat, and can begin to color. Boiling only to roughly 235-240F and taking it off is the safer course; much past that and the macaroons set hard and dry.
- Order of operationsCoconut first, then the whites, and slowly — the syrup is hot enough to set egg white on contact. Adding it in a thin stream while stirring keeps the mixture smooth instead of curdled and grainy.
- The coconutLarkin Shredded Cocoanut was one of the groceries the Larkin Company sold by mail; beyond the name, the cut of the shred and whether it was sweetened are not recorded here. Half a pound is about 2 1/2 to 3 cups of modern unsweetened desiccated or flaked coconut. Sweetened bagged coconut is both sweeter and damper, which will loosen the batter and can make the result cloying.
- Slow ovenThe book gives no figure; in cookbooks of this period a slow oven is usually taken as somewhere around 300-325F. The low heat is deliberate: the point is to dry the macaroons through while barely coloring the shreds. Judge by eye rather than by a set time -- pale gold tips and firm bases.
- Buttered tinsSugar-bound macaroons weld themselves to metal. Parchment on a flat sheet works far better than butter alone, and lets them come away whole once cool.
- Yield and shapingDropped by the spoonful this makes somewhere in the region of two to three dozen small macaroons, depending on the size of the spoon. They spread very little, so a compact mound holds its shape.
- StorageFully dried, they keep a week in a tin. Underbaked ones weep syrup within a day, so err toward the longer bake rather than a shorter one.
- The stray text at the endThe lines beginning "WHITE CAKE No. I" belong to the next recipe on the page and have nothing to do with the macaroons.
Macaroons began as almond-and-egg-white confections in Europe and were reworked in American kitchens around cheap, shelf-stable shredded coconut, which arrived in quantity in the later nineteenth century once dried coconut could be shipped and packaged. The brand name here is the giveaway about the book's origins: the Larkin Company of Buffalo sold soap and groceries by mail, and its household booklets printed recipes that called for Larkin products by name — an early and effective form of branded content. Boiling a sugar syrup and beating it into egg whites was the standard confectioner's move of the period, familiar to any cook who made boiled frosting, and it does here what almond paste does in the older recipes: it holds the mass together without flour.