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Common Boxed Macaroons
12 ounces almonds. 8 ounces granulated sugar. 4 ounces flour. 4 eggs. Pinch of salt. 1 teaspoonful ammonia.
Crush the almonds without taking off the skins, with a rolling-pin upon the table. Mix them and the powder, sugar and flour together in a bowl. Drop the eggs in the middle and mix the whole into a rather soft dough. Place in lumps size of cherries on baking pan? very slightly greased. Bake in a slack oven light brown. A few bitter almonds or peach kernels mixed in improves them.
The body of this formula is a plain commercial almond drop from the bakeshop era, but the closing suggestion takes it out of range for a home kitchen. The notes below explain the terms and the hazard.
- Bitter almonds and peach kernelsBoth contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and wetted — exactly what this method does. Bitter almonds cannot legally be sold raw in the United States for this reason, and peach, apricot and cherry kernels carry the same compound in variable, unmeasured amounts. A short bake at low heat does not reliably drive it off, and the recipe gives no quantity at all.
- Why the rest does not rescue itThe almond, sugar, flour and egg base is ordinary, but the instruction as printed treats the kernels as an improvement to be added freely. There is no safe home method for gauging how many kernels are too many, so a current macaroon recipe should be used instead.
- "Ammonia"This means baker's ammonia — ammonium carbonate, also sold as hartshorn — not household cleaning ammonia, which is a poison. It was the standard leavener for flat, crisp, low-moisture bakery goods before baking powder displaced it, and it gives off a sharp smell in the oven that dissipates as the cookie dries.
- "The powder"No powder is listed separately in the ingredients; it most likely refers back to the ammonia, which was bought and weighed as a powder. On that reading no additional ingredient is intended.
- "Slack oven"A cool or gently heated oven; period glossaries put it somewhere around 275-325F, though usage varied and the book gives no temperature.
- Weights, not cupsThe dry ingredients here are given by weight (the ammonia is by spoon and the eggs by count): 12 ounces of almonds is about 2 1/2 cups whole, 8 ounces of granulated sugar about 1 1/8 cups, 4 ounces of flour just under 1 cup. Eggs of the period were probably smaller on average than a modern large egg.
- "Common boxed"'Boxed' probably indicates goods packed for retail sale by the box rather than sold loose from the counter, i.e. a cheap keeping cookie; the skins left on the almonds and the flour in the mix are consistent with that grade.
American bakery manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tended to distinguish macaroons by cost: the fine sort used blanched almonds or almond paste with whites only, while the "common" grade left the skins on, cut the nuts with flour and whole eggs, and leaned on baker's ammonia for lift. Almond flavour in the cheap grades was often reinforced with bitter almonds or with peach and apricot kernels, which were cheap and readily available — the same economy that is generally credited with putting kernel-derived flavouring into ratafias, noyau and countless nineteenth-century puddings. The practice appears to have been widespread and attracted little comment at the time; the cyanogenic glycoside responsible for both the flavour and the danger was understood by chemists well before it was regulated in the kitchen, and commercial bitter-almond flavouring is now made synthetically or processed to remove the toxin.