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Almond Meringue Puffs
Take some of the white icing as made for meringue puffs, drop round portions like large marbles of baking pans and stick 5 or 6 halves of almonds that have been blanched and split, in each one, in circular order, and bake carefully.
A two-line recipe that assumes you have already turned to the meringue puff entry for the "white icing" — a stiff meringue of egg whites and sugar. Everything hinges on baking it low enough that it dries rather than colors.
- The base"White icing as made for meringue puffs" is a plain hard meringue of egg whites whipped stiff with sugar added gradually; the recipe itself gives no quantities, so the proportions must come from the meringue puff entry it points back to. A warmed, Swiss-style method (sugar and whites heated together before whipping) gives a more stable mass for dropping, but the recipe does not specify one.
- "Bake carefully" means low"Bake carefully" is the whole instruction, and the book gives no temperature. In modern terms meringues are usually dried at a low oven, around 200-250F for an hour or more, with the oven then turned off and the door left ajar until cool; too hot an oven will brown and crack them and scorch the almonds before the centers dry.
- Blanching the almondsPour boiling water over shelled almonds, let stand two minutes, drain, and slip the skins off between finger and thumb. Split them along the natural seam while still damp; once dry they shatter. Sliced commercial almonds are thinner and will darken faster than hand-split halves.
- Size and spacing"Large marbles" is about a heaped teaspoon, an inch across. Meringue barely spreads, so an inch between them is enough.
- The pansThe recipe says only "baking pans"; period meringue instructions commonly call for paper laid on the tin. Parchment is better and lifts cleanly; a greased bare pan tends to weld the meringue down.
- Setting the almondsPress the halves in point-down while the surface is still tacky, radiating out like petals. If the meringue has begun to crust, the nuts will fall off after baking.
- StorageAirtight, at room temperature, and never the refrigerator. Humidity turns them leathery within hours.
Recipes of this kind belong to the era when a professional pastry cook worked around the falling heat of a coal or wood oven rather than a thermostat — the meringues are often said to have gone in last, after the bread and cakes were out, to dry slowly in the residual warmth. The word meringue enters English cookery in the eighteenth century and is generally traced to French practice. The terseness of an entry like this is explained simply by the cross-reference: the reader already knows the icing, and the entry exists only to record one variation on it. Almonds were the default nut of the ornamental pastry trade, imported and expensive enough that five or six split halves arranged in a circle counted as decoration in its own right.