Home › Recipes › Almond Rings and Fingers
Almond Rings and Fingers
Make the same as the preceding with 8 ounces of blanched almonds minced very small. Put a smaller tube in the forcing sack, and form finger shapes and rings of the almond meringue paste on baking pans, and bake them in a very slack oven. These all bake light and nearly hollow and have a fine glazed surface.
The foregoing varieties, which can all be made out of one large bowl of meringue paste form a handsome assortment for the cake stands, to build pyra mids, to place around glass bowls of fruit, to decorate cakes and to fill icing or nougat baskets with.
This is a continuation recipe: it assumes you already have the meringue paste from the preceding entry, a stiff beaten-egg-white and sugar mixture piped from a forcing sack. The points below cover what the terse instructions leave unsaid.
- "A very slack oven" is 200-225F"A very slack oven" is the coolest working heat of a wood or coal oven, well below browning; period usage puts it roughly in the 200-250F range, though this book gives no figure. Treat it as drying rather than baking, keep the shapes pale, and judge doneness by feel rather than by a set time.
- The forcing sack is a piping bagAnd "a smaller tube" means a plain tip narrower than the one used for the preceding variety. Keep the opening plain and wide enough that the chopped nut pieces pass without tearing the paste.
- Mince, do not grind"Minced very small" is chopped fine with a knife, not reduced to flour or paste. Almond flour will slacken the meringue and food-processed almonds release oil, which deflates beaten whites; chop by hand or pulse very briefly.
- Blanching the 8 ouncesBlanched means skinned: pour boiling water over whole almonds, stand 1 minute, drain and slip the skins off, then dry them thoroughly before chopping. Damp almonds will weep into the meringue and stop it setting glossy.
- The hinge is folding, not stirringAdd the almonds in two or three additions with a spatula, cutting down and over. Any beating at this stage collapses the foam and the pieces bake dense and chewy instead of "light and nearly hollow."
- Pans and releaseThe recipe says only "baking pans"; period bakers used paper or lightly greased tin. Parchment on a heavy sheet is more reliable; a hot pan or an unlined dark sheet will color the undersides, which works against the "fine glazed surface" the recipe describes.
- Yield and storageThe recipe gives no yield, and the amount of meringue paste depends on the preceding entry, so the count of fingers and rings will vary. They keep for some days in an airtight tin but soften quickly in humid air, so fill and assemble them close to serving.
Piped meringue in fancy shapes belongs to the pastry cook's stock in trade, when a confectioner was expected to produce an assortment from a single preparation and arrange it as architecture: pyramids, borders around a glass bowl of fruit, fillings for icing and nougat baskets. That logic of one paste worked many ways is what this entry records, and it explains why the instructions are so brief, since the reader is assumed to have the preceding meringue already in the bowl. Almonds were the default nut of European confectionery long before this book was written, and neutral enough to take sugar without fighting it. The very slack oven is a reminder of how these ovens were used: after the day's bread and cakes came out, the falling residual heat would have suited the slow drying of meringues, and nothing was wasted.