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Macaroon Cream
¼ box gelatine or 1 tablespoon granulated gelatine 1/4 cup cold water 2 cups scalded milk Yolks 3 eggs 1/3 cup sugar 1/8 teaspoon salt ⅔ cup pounded macaroons 1 teaspoon vanilla Whites 3 eggs Soak gelatine in cold water. Make custard of milk, yolks of eggs, sugar, and salt; add gelatine, and strain into pan set in ice-water. Add macaroons and flavoring, stirring until it begins to thicken; then add whites of eggs beaten stiff, mould, chill, and serve garnished with macaroons.
A gelatine-set custard cream of the sort that filled the cold-dessert chapter of every turn-of-the-century American cookbook. One structural feature of it puts the dish outside current food-safety practice.
- Raw egg whitesThe three whites are beaten stiff and folded into a custard that has already been strained and set over ice-water, so they never reach any cooking temperature at all. Nothing later in the method heats them; the mould only chills. Uncooked whites carry a salmonella risk that was not understood when this was written, and a modern recipe should be used instead.
- Gelatine measuresGelatine of the period came in boxes divided into sheets or leaves, and a quarter box was reckoned equal to about one tablespoon of the granulated kind, close to a standard modern envelope. The two alternative measures are given because the ingredient was sold in both forms.
- What macaroons meantNot the coconut drop and not the French macaron, but a hard, dry almond-and-egg-white biscuit meant for storing. They were pounded in a mortar to crumbs; the dry, brittle sort is what the recipe assumes, and a soft chewy macaroon would behave quite differently.
- Scalded milkScalding meant heating milk to just below the boil, until bubbles formed round the edge of the pan. With milk of uncertain keeping quality it may have served a hygienic purpose as well as speeding the custard along.
- The pan in ice-waterStraining the hot custard directly into a chilled pan was the standard way to arrest cooking and start the gelatine setting. It is the reason the whites are added at the last moment, when the mixture is already thickening and will hold them suspended.
Macaroon Cream belongs to the family of moulded gelatine desserts that came to dominate the cold-dessert chapters of American cookbooks once commercially packaged gelatine made setting a cream a matter of an envelope rather than a day spent boiling calves' feet. The Boston Cooking-School book gives a range of variations on the same base -- a stirred custard, softened gelatine, a flavouring, and stiff whites folded in for lightness -- differing chiefly in what is stirred through. Here it is pounded macaroons, the dry almond biscuits whose name is generally traced through the Italian maccherone and which were valued in a nineteenth-century larder precisely because they kept: a tin of stale macaroons could be crushed into a pudding, a charlotte, or a cream long after they were too hard to eat out of hand. The garnish of whole macaroons around the turned-out mould is characteristic of the period's insistence that a dessert announce its own flavouring at the table.