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Macaroon Paste
12 ounces of grated cocoanut. 8 ounces of powdered sugar. 2 whites of eggs. Little lemon extract.
Stir the above ingredients together in a bowl, the sugar and whites first and the cocoanut added.
Place the paste, either with a teaspoon or with a tube and forcing-sack, in long cords across the sheets of cake, and then diagonally across to form diamond-shaped hollows. The cord of macaroon paste need be no thicker than a pencil. Then bake in a slack oven with the door open till top is brown. When cold drop spots of clear fruit jelly in the hollows between the ridges of macaroon paste.
This is a bakeshop component rather than a cookie: a stiff coconut meringue piped in a lattice over sheet cake, baked just enough to set and colour, then dotted with jelly. The consistency of the paste is what decides whether it works.
- A slack oven, door open"slack" in period usage means a cool oven, generally taken as somewhere around 250-300F. The open door lets steam escape so the paste dries and sets rather than souffleing and slumping. Bake to colour, as the recipe directs, not to a clock.
- "Grated cocoanut"In this period that meant fresh coconut grated fine, or the newer packaged desiccated coconut, both unsweetened. Modern sweetened flaked coconut will make the paste cloying and far wetter; use unsweetened desiccated or fine macaroon coconut, and cut the shreds shorter if they are long enough to catch in a piping tube.
- Powdered sugarNineteenth-century powdered sugar was granulated sugar ground fine, without the cornstarch in today's confectioners' sugar. Either works here; modern confectioners' sugar absorbs slightly more moisture, so the paste may need a little extra white.
- Getting the consistency rightTwo whites for 12 oz of coconut is a stiff paste by design. It should hold a pencil-thick line without spreading and without cracking as it leaves the tube. Add white a teaspoon at a time if it tears, and let it stand ten minutes if it slackens, as the coconut keeps drawing moisture.
- Piping the latticeA plain tube of about 1/4 inch is right. Pipe all the parallel lines in one direction first, then the diagonals, and keep the spacing even, since the hollows have to hold jelly without it running off the edge of the sheet.
- The jelly"Clear fruit jelly" means a strained, bright jelly such as currant, apple or quince, warmed just enough to drop cleanly from a spoon. It must go on cold cake and cold paste, or it will thin out and bleed into the crumb.
Macaroons began as almond confections in Italy and France, the name generally traced to the Italian maccarone, a paste, and for centuries the paste in question was pounded almonds with sugar and white of egg. Coconut versions appear in English and American baking during the nineteenth century, and became common as imported coconut and packaged desiccated coconut grew cheaper and more widely available, offering a less costly alternative to almond paste. The recipe's vocabulary -- sheets of cake, tube and forcing-sack -- points to a bakers' manual rather than a home cookbook: it is not a batch of cookies but a decorating paste for giving a plain sheet cake a piped, browned, jewelled top. Lattice-and-jelly finishes of this kind were a familiar bakery ornament, and similar work appears on tarts and in linzer-style pastry.