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Doughnuts, Crullers, Etc (Much cocoanut as will make it)
much cocoanut as will make it as thick as can be easily stirred with a spoon. Drop on greased paper and bake.
MACAROONS-One-half pound of sweet almonds; one-half pound of powdered sugar; the whites of two eggs. Blanch the almonds and pound them to a paste; add to them the sugar and the eggs after they have been beaten to a stiff froth; work the whole together with the back of a spoon, then roll the mixture in your hands into balls about the size of a nutmeg; lay them on a paper at least an inch apart. Bake them in a slow oven, a light brown.
Two recipes collide here: the tail end of a coconut macaroon and a complete almond macaroon. Both are meringue-bound cookies with no flour and no leavening, so the whole result depends on how much air stays in the whites and how dry the oven is.
- The truncated first recipeThe opening line is the tail end of a coconut macaroon whose beginning is missing. All that survives is the consistency cue — coconut stirred in until the mixture is as thick as can be easily stirred with a spoon — and the instruction to drop it on greased paper and bake. Treat it as a fragment rather than a recipe you can follow.
- "A slow oven"Roughly 275-300F. For almond macaroons that is deliberate: you want them to dry and set slowly rather than colour quickly, which is why the book asks only for a light brown as the finish.
- WeightsHalf a pound of almonds is about 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 cups whole; half a pound of modern confectioners' sugar is about 2 cups sifted, while the finely ground granulated sugar that "powdered" usually meant here packs closer to a cup to the half pound. Weigh if you can, since cup measures for both drift badly.
- Pounding the almondsA food processor replaces the mortar, but pulse in short bursts with a spoonful of the sugar. Run it continuously and the almonds go to oily butter, and the batter will spread flat.
- "Beaten to a stiff froth"Two whites for a pound of dry ingredients is very little binder, so the whites must be at full stiff peak before they go in. Folding with the back of a spoon, as directed, is the right instinct — a whisk deflates the mass.
- Size and spacingA nutmeg is roughly three-quarters of an inch to an inch across, so a ball of about that size. The recipe's "at least an inch apart" is generous for a cookie that barely spreads, but they stick, so keep the space.
- The paperNote that this recipe says paper and not greased paper. Parchment works as written; ungreased modern baking paper is closer to the original intent than a greased sheet, which encourages spreading.
- Yield and storageExpect roughly three to four dozen small macaroons. They tend to soften within a day in a sealed tin; if you want them crisp, leave them in the cooling oven with the door ajar.
Almond macaroons of exactly this construction — nuts, sugar, egg white, no flour — are far older than this book, and are generally traced to Italian convent baking before they were taken up in France and then England. The insistence on "sweet almonds" is a survival from an era when the bitter almond was a distinct grocery item sold for flavouring, and cookbooks had to say which one you wanted. By the time Butterick was publishing, the macaroon had split into two households: the ground-almond kind here, and the coconut kind whose fragment opens the page, which is generally said to have spread quickly in American kitchens once desiccated shredded coconut became cheap and shelf-stable, apparently in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. That both sit under a heading for doughnuts and crullers says something about how loosely these compendiums were organised — small sweet things went wherever the page had room.