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Chocolate Macaroons
2 squares Lowney's Premium Chocolate teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla Mix almond paste and sugar, until the mixture feels like meal; add whites of eggs, one at a time, and work with a spatula until there are no lumps; add chocolate, salt and vanilla. Drop from a teaspoon on to a buttered paper; bake twenty to thirty minutes in a slow oven. Remove from paper as soon as cooked. If baked in a quick oven, they will not be a success.
The ingredient list as printed has been damaged in transmission — only the chocolate, salt and vanilla survive with quantities. The method is intact and is the part that matters, but you will need proportions from elsewhere.
- Missing quantitiesThe almond paste, sugar and egg whites are all called for in the method but their amounts are gone from the printed list. A standard macaroon of this type runs about 8 oz almond paste to 8 oz sugar with 2 to 3 egg whites; the original book's figures cannot be recovered from this page, so treat any number as a reconstruction rather than the recipe.
- Squares of chocolate'Premium' in this period denotes unsweetened baking chocolate, sold in cakes scored into squares of about 1 oz, so two squares should mean roughly 2 oz unsweetened. The recipe does not say to melt it; melted and cooled slightly is the usual reading of such instructions, but it is a reading, not the printed direction.
- Slow ovenRoughly 250-325F in modern terms; the book gives no figures, so read it as the cooler end of the range. The warning is not decorative: the macaroons must dry as much as they bake, and higher heat sets the crust before the interior stabilises, so they crack, spread and scorch on the bottom.
- Almond paste, not marzipanUse almond paste, which is roughly equal parts almonds and sugar and firm enough to break down into meal against the sugar. Marzipan carries far more sugar and glucose and will not take the beating this method depends on.
- Working the pasteRubbing paste and sugar to the texture of meal before any liquid goes in is what prevents lumps later. Egg whites added one at a time, worked smooth each time, keeps the mixture from breaking into a slurry.
- Buttered paperParchment replaces the buttered paper and needs no greasing. The instruction to lift them off as soon as they come out still holds — the sugar sets hard as it cools and warm macaroons release cleanly where cold ones tear.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, one of a large family of American cookbooks published by chocolate and flour manufacturers to move product — which is why the chocolate here is specified by brand and counted in squares, the shape Lowney sold it in. The macaroon itself is much older than the chocolate version: an almond-paste-and-egg-white confection generally traced to Italian and French convent baking, reaching English and American cookery well before 1800. Melted unsweetened chocolate was added to that base, and the insistence on a slow oven reflects the reality of coal and wood ranges, where the cook chose a cooler part of the oven or waited for the fire to fall rather than setting a dial.