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Macaroon Tarts
Line small patty pans with sweet tart paste, half fill with macaroon paste, made either with grated cocoanut or minced almonds, and bake slowly in a very slack oven. The insides rise rounded and partially hollow.
A two-sentence formula that assumes you already have both a sweet paste and a macaroon paste on hand, as a working pastry cook would. The temperature is the whole trick.
- "Very slack oven"Slack means barely warm by baking standards; a modern equivalent is somewhere around 275-300F. Macaroon paste browns and cracks quickly, and a hotter oven is likely to set the filling before it can lift.
- Patty pansSmall shallow tins, roughly 2 to 2 1/2 inches across, closer to a mini muffin or tartlet tin than a modern cupcake pan. A 24-cup mini muffin tin is the nearest thing on sale now.
- Sweet tart pasteA sweetened short paste, what would now be called pâte sucrée: flour, butter, sugar, a little egg. Roll it thin, about 1/8 inch, and line the tins without blind baking, since the long slow bake cooks shell and filling together.
- Macaroon pasteGround blanched almonds or grated coconut worked with roughly an equal weight of sugar and enough egg white to make a soft, spreadable paste, not a batter. The coconut here may be fresh-grated or the commercially desiccated kind then coming on the market; today's sweetened flaked coconut will need the sugar cut back noticeably.
- Half fill and no moreThe paste puffs as the egg white expands, then sets against the shell wall. Fill past halfway and it domes over the rim and runs.
- Judging donenessAround 25-35 minutes at 300F. The tops should be set and only faintly gold; there is no visible spring to test, so go by colour and a dry surface.
- The hollow"Rounded and partially hollow" is the intended result, not a fault. The recipe stops there and does not say what, if anything, the cavity was for.
- YieldA cup of ground almonds or coconut made into paste fills roughly a dozen small tartlets.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late nineteenth-century trade manuals written for hotel and restaurant bakeshops rather than home kitchens, which is why the instructions are so compressed: the reader is assumed to have tubs of sweet paste and macaroon paste already standing. Macaroon paste itself is much older than the book, an almond-and-sugar mixture bound with egg white that goes back to the Italian and French almond confectionery tradition, and the word macaroon is generally traced through French macaron to Italian maccarone, a paste. The alternative given here, grated coconut, fits the period: cheap steam transport and commercial desiccating plants made coconut an everyday American baking ingredient in the last quarter of the century. Baking the paste inside a lined tin, rather than dropping it on paper, gave a delicate confection a form sturdy enough to sit on a tray of assorted small tarts.