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Almond Drops
3 eggs 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar 2 cups blanched and finely chopped almonds 1 oz. each bitter and sweet chocolate 1 teaspoon vanilla Beat the eggs and sugar together until very light, add the almonds, melted chocolate and vanilla. Chill the dough, stand a little while to stiffen. Bake in tiny greased paper cups in a slow oven (300 degrees F.) about 25 minutes. Cool before removing from cups. This will make thirty or more.
A flourless almond-and-chocolate drop, closer to a macaroon than a cookie. The recipe already gives its own oven temperature, which is unusual for the period and worth respecting.
- "Bitter chocolate" is unsweetened chocolateIn American recipes of this era, bitter chocolate means plain unsweetened baking chocolate, sold in one-ounce squares. It has nothing to do with bitter almonds. Use 1 oz unsweetened and 1 oz semisweet or a plain sweet eating chocolate.
- Slow oven300F as stated. The batter is essentially egg, sugar and nuts, so a hotter oven browns the outside before the centre sets. Check at 20 minutes; they should be dry to the touch and just barely coloured.
- Paper cups"Tiny paper cups" here means small fluted paper baking cases; the recipe does not say what they were set in or on. Mini muffin liners in a mini muffin pan give better support; grease them as directed, since egg-and-sugar batters stick hard.
- The chilling stepChill the mixture until it firms up enough to spoon without running; twenty to thirty minutes is usually enough.
- Melted chocolate temperatureLet the melted chocolate cool to barely warm before it goes into the beaten eggs. Hot chocolate will cook streaks of egg and deflate the foam you spent time building.
- Chopping the almondsFinely chopped, not ground. A food processor will turn blanched almonds to paste in seconds; pulse, or chop by hand, so the drops keep some texture. The recipe measures the almonds after chopping, which works out to roughly 10 oz of whole blanched almonds.
- Beating the eggs"Very light" means the whole eggs and sugar beaten to a pale, thick ribbon, several minutes with an electric mixer. This is the only leavening in the recipe.
- Yield and keepingThirty or more small drops. They cool to a chewy centre and keep well for several days in a tin; they soften if left uncovered in a humid kitchen.
Nut-and-egg confections like this belong to the long macaroon family, which reached American home baking through European almond pastry and needed no flour, no butter and no chemical leavening. Printed oven temperatures like this one became common as gas and electric ranges with thermostats spread through American kitchens, and cookbooks began pairing "a slow oven" with a number, as here. Combining unsweetened and sweet chocolate in small equal amounts was one way of adjusting bitterness and sweetness at a time when the range of chocolate available to home bakers was narrow.