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Mock Macaroons
1 egg-white
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup chopped salted nuts
Beat the sugar into the stiffly beaten egg-white, and add the nuts. Drop by spoonfuls on a greased pan and bake in a slow oven (320° F.) for fifteen minutes.
Three ingredients, no fat, no flour — this is a brown-sugar meringue drop rather than a true macaroon. The whole thing hinges on beating the whites properly and on the salt in the nuts.
- OvenThe recipe helpfully gives the number: 320°F. Anything hotter and the brown sugar may darken and weep before the meringue sets.
- Beat the whites firstBeat the white to stiff peaks before the sugar goes in, exactly as written. Brown sugar is heavier and damper than granulated and will deflate a soft foam.
- Sift the sugarModern light brown still needs breaking up. Press out lumps through a sieve or you will get gritty pockets that melt into holes.
- Salted nutsThe salt is the flavour of the cookie, not an accident — this belongs to the era of salted peanuts and salted almonds sold by the pound. Use roasted salted peanuts or almonds; unsalted nuts will make the result flatly sweet.
- PanA greased pan works but these stick badly as the sugar caramelises. Parchment on a heavy sheet is more reliable, and the cookies lift off clean once cool.
- TimingFifteen minutes gives a soft, chewy centre. If you want them crisp through, they will need longer at the same temperature, then a full cooling on the sheet.
- HumidityMeringue-type drops go tacky in damp weather. Bake on a dry day and store airtight with a sheet of parchment between layers.
- YieldThey spread very little, so a rounded teaspoon per drop, an inch apart, is enough.
"Mock" recipes fill the cheaper corners of turn-of-the-century American cookbooks, and the name generally signals a substitution: mock turtle soup without the turtle, mock cream without the cream. A proper macaroon needs almond paste or blanched sweet almonds pounded to a paste, an expensive and laborious business; here the almond is replaced outright by whatever salted nuts were in the house, and the granulated sugar by brown. The result belongs to a family of egg-white drop cookies — kisses, nut wafers, divinity drops — baked in a steady low oven. Salted nuts themselves were a fashionable commodity of the 1900s and 1910s, sold at confectioners and served in dishes at card parties, and this recipe reads like a use for what was left in the dish.