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Spring Lake Gems
Make macaroon paste by the receipt for common macaroons, drop portions on baking pans and flatten them somewhat by means of two spoons. Bake the macaroons, and when slacked baked put them into party pans or gem pans of corresponding size and press them into the shape to form a sort of little baskets when cold. Ornament the edges of these with small spots icing as in the preceding article, bake a minute or two, and when cold fill the gems with minced wine jelly of different colers mixed.
A shaped-macaroon shell filled with chopped wine jelly, written for a hotel pastry department that assumed you already had macaroon paste and jelly on hand. The whole trick is timing the moulding.
- The hinge: mould them warm"Slacked baked" means baked only to the point of setting, still pale and pliable — not crisp. Press them into the pans the moment they come out of the oven; once a macaroon cools it shatters rather than curves.
- Macaroon pasteThe "common macaroon" of this period is ground blanched almonds (or almond paste) beaten with sugar and enough egg white to make a soft dropping paste — no flour, no leavening. Modern almond paste from a tube works, loosened with egg white.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a cast-iron muffin pan; cup sizes vary, often in the region of 2 inches across. What the book means by "party pans" is not stated — probably a smaller pan of tartlet size, since it asks for pans "of corresponding size." Any mini-muffin tin serves. Press the hot disc into the cup with the back of a spoon or a second, smaller tin.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Macaroons of this type suit a moderate oven, roughly 325–350F. Judge by the look rather than the clock: you want them set but still pliable, well short of the crisp, unbendable stage.
- Icing spotsThe "preceding article" is not reproduced here; the icing is presumably piped in small dots and flashed in the oven a minute or two to set the surface without colouring it. Keep the oven low, as icing of this kind browns quickly.
- Minced wine jellyA firm gelatine jelly flavoured and coloured with wine, set in shallow pans, turned out and chopped fine so the pieces glitter. Set it firmer than you would a moulded jelly, or the mince weeps into the macaroon shell. Fill only at the last moment before service for the same reason.
- YieldNot stated, and it depends entirely on which macaroon receipt is used. A batch built on 8 oz each of almonds and sugar might give something in the region of two dozen small baskets.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of trade manuals Jessup Whitehead wrote for American hotel and restaurant kitchens in the 1880s and 90s, and it reads like shop instruction rather than home cookery: the reader is expected to know the macaroon and jelly receipts already and only needs the assembly. "Gems" here means nothing more than small cakes baked in a gem pan, the cast-iron muffin pan that was standard American equipment by the 1870s; the word attached itself to anything turned out of one. Resort and hotel names were routinely pinned onto pastries of this kind to dress a menu, and Spring Lake — a fashionable New Jersey shore resort in exactly this period — is very likely the reference, though the book does not say so. The filling is a good index of late-Victorian dessert taste: a wine jelly, set hard, chopped, and mixed in several colours.