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Nut Macaroons
1 cup pecan nut meats ¼ teaspoon salt Beat white of egg until stiff and add gradually, while beating constantly, sugar. Fold in nut meats, finely chopped and sprinkled with salt. Drop from tip of spoon, one inch apart, on a buttered sheet, and bake in a moderate oven until delicately browned. 1 cup sugar 1/4 cup melted butter 1 egg, unbeaten
A two-ingredient meringue cookie plus salt, once you sort out the text. The printed ingredient list here has clearly picked up stray lines from a neighbouring recipe, so read the method rather than the list.
- The stray ingredient linesThe method uses only egg white, sugar, pecans and salt. The trailing "1/4 cup melted butter" and "1 egg, unbeaten" play no part in the method and look like stray lines picked up from a neighbouring recipe; ignore them, since fat will deflate a meringue batter. The salt is a quarter teaspoon, as printed.
- How much egg whiteThe method says "white of egg", singular: one egg white to one cup of sugar and one cup of nuts. That is a high proportion of sugar, which is probably what keeps them holding their dropped shape rather than spreading.
- Moderate ovenThe recipe gives no temperature. "Moderate oven" in books of this period is generally taken as somewhere around 350F. For a sugar-heavy meringue the lower end is safer: about 325F, watching for the faintest colour. "Delicately browned" means pale tan, not golden.
- Add the sugar slowlyThis is the hinge. Beat the white to stiff peaks first, then rain the sugar in a spoonful at a time while beating, or the sugar weeps and the cookies bake into flat sheets of caramel.
- Chop, don't grindFinely chopped pecans, not pecan flour. A food processor will turn a cup of pecans to paste in seconds and the oil will deflate the meringue; chop by hand or pulse very briefly.
- The buttered sheetA greased pan is the usual cause of these spreading and sticking. Parchment or a silicone mat does the job better and lets the cooled macaroons lift off whole.
- Yield and donenessRoughly 24 to 30 small cookies from this quantity, baked 15 to 20 minutes. They should feel dry and crisp on the outside and lift cleanly; leave them on the sheet a few minutes before moving.
- KeepingAirtight, or they go soft within hours in a humid kitchen. Avoid making them on a damp day at all — meringue batters draw water from the air.
Macaroons in nineteenth-century American cookbooks were generally understood broadly, as small cookies built on beaten egg white and sugar, with almonds, coconut or, as here, native nuts standing in for the almond paste of the European original. Pecans mark this as an American variant: the tree is native to the Mississippi valley and the southern states, and commercial pecan growing was expanding in the decades around 1900. The genealogy back to Italian and French almond macarons is generally traced rather than documented, but the technique -- stiff white, sugar beaten in, dropped from a spoon -- is the same one.