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Macaroon Bisque
1 cup heavy cream Powdered sugar Vanilla 18 macaroons 6 Maraschino cherries Whip a cup of cream until stiff, sweeten with powdered sugar and flavor lightly with vanilla. Stir in six macaroons broken in small pieces, but not powdered. Pile in sherbet glasses with a border of the whole macaroons and decorate with marshmallows or Maraschino cherries. This is an excellent emergency dessert.
A three-ingredient icebox dessert built entirely on the quality of the macaroons. Buy or bake almond macaroons, not the coconut kind, and the dish makes sense.
- What "bisque" means hereIn dessert sections of this period bisque generally means a rich cream mixture carrying crushed macaroons or nuts rather than a soup; it was often frozen, though nothing here is. Nothing is cooked or churned: this is sweetened whipped cream with macaroon pieces stirred through.
- The macaroonsAlmond macaroons (crisp-chewy meringue and ground almond, close to Italian amaretti) are the likely intent, though the book does not say, and coconut macaroons also appear in American books of this period. Modern shredded-coconut macaroons will read as a different dessert, and French macaron shells are too fragile to hold a border.
- Broken, not powderedThe instruction to break the six macaroons in small pieces rather than crush them is the hinge. Pieces keep some chew in the cream; dust disperses into it and loses the contrast the dish depends on.
- SweeteningNo quantity is given for the powdered sugar. Two tablespoons to a cup of cream is enough, since the macaroons are already sweet; taste before you add more. Vanilla "lightly" means about half a teaspoon.
- Whipping the creamStiff here means it holds a firm peak, because it has to support a border of whole cookies. Cold cream and a cold bowl get you there faster, and stopping just short of grainy is important -- there is no other body in the dish.
- Sherbet glassesSmall stemmed glasses of roughly 5 to 6 ounces. Any similar footed glass or coupe works; the point is that the macaroon border stands upright around the rim.
- Yield and timingEighteen macaroons and six cherries indicate six servings -- six macaroons broken into the cream, two whole per glass. Assemble within half an hour of serving, or the border softens and the cream begins to weep.
Cream desserts thickened with crushed almond macaroons were a standing trick of late nineteenth and early twentieth century American cookery, appearing as "macaroon cream," "macaroon bisque" and, when frozen, "biscuit tortoni." The word bisque was applied loosely in American usage to rich cream mixtures holding ground almonds, nuts or crumbs rather than to soup. The frank note that it is "an excellent emergency dessert" places it in the period's household economy: bakery macaroons kept well in a tin, cream was on hand, and a guest could be fed something that looked composed quickly without lighting the stove. Maraschino cherries, a cheap and shelf-stable pantry staple by this period, do the decorating work that fresh fruit could not do year-round.