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Macaroons (Pound pulverized sugar Whites)
1 pound pulverized sugar Whites of 3 eggs 1/2 pound shelled almonds 1 teaspoon vanilla Blanch the almonds and plunge them into cold water. Run them through a chopper or pound them as fine as possible; add the vanilla and sugar and the whites of the eggs, well beaten. Work the paste thoroughly; then dip the hands in water and roll the paste into balls the size of a nutmeg. Lay them on buttered paper an inch apart and bake fifteen or twenty minutes in a slow oven.
A plain almond macaroon of the old school: ground almonds, sugar and egg white, with no flour, no leavening and no coconut. The paste is worked rather than folded, so the result is chewy and dense rather than airy.
- Slow ovenBake at 300F. These are meant to dry and set to a pale biscuit colour, not to brown; at higher heat the sugar caramelises and the outside cracks before the centre is done.
- Pulverized sugarIn this period the term usually means a finely ground sugar somewhere between today's caster and confectioners' sugar. Confectioners' sugar works and dissolves readily into the paste, though it carries cornstarch; superfine granulated gives a slightly crisper edge.
- Blanching the almondsCover shelled almonds with boiling water for about a minute, then plunge into cold water as directed and slip off the skins. The cold plunge is not decorative — it firms the nut so it grinds rather than smears.
- GrindingA food processor stands in for the chopper, but pulse in short bursts and add a spoonful of the sugar to keep the almonds from turning to butter. Half a pound of blanched almonds is roughly 1 1/2 cups whole, and rather more than that by volume once ground.
- Working the pasteThe instruction to work it thoroughly matters. The sugar has to dissolve into the whites so the paste holds a ball; underworked, it crumbles on the sheet and spreads unevenly.
- Buttered paperUse parchment, unbuttered. Greased paper was a usual release in this period; parchment does the job without adding fat that makes the bottoms greasy.
- Size and yieldA nutmeg is about an inch across, so roughly two teaspoons of paste per ball; a batch of this size will run to several dozen.
- CoolingLeave them on the paper until fully cool. Warm macaroons tear; once set they lift cleanly, and they keep several days in a tin, softening slightly as they sit.
Almond macaroons predate the sandwiched French macaron by centuries and are essentially a confectioner's use for the same three things a marzipan maker keeps on hand: almonds, sugar and egg white. The name is generally traced through the Italian maccarone, a word applied to various pastes, and the biscuits are traditionally associated with Italian and French convent baking long before they became a standard American cookbook entry. The vanilla points to a later American hand — earlier English and French recipes lean on bitter almond or rosewater for the aromatic note, and by this date commercial vanilla extract was cheap and widely used — though a flavouring alone will not date a recipe closely. The recipe also assumes a cook who blanches and pounds her own nuts, a task that ground almond meal sold by the bag has since erased.