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Macaroon Tarts
Mix the yolks of two eggs with one halfcup of granulated sugar and beat until light. Roll a half dozen dry macaroons and flavor with either the grated rind and juice of an orange or a lemon, as preferred. Mix this with a tablespoon of melted butter. Beat all these ingredients until they are smooth and then add the stiffly beaten whites of the two eggs. Cover inverted patty-tins with puff paste, prick, and bake in a hot oven. When cool, fill with marmalade or jelly and cover with the macaroon mixtures. Place for a moment or two in the oven until the tops brown.
A late-Victorian tartlet that uses crushed almond macaroons as the body of a soft, souffléd topping. The hinge is the pastry: the shells are baked over the outside of the tins, so they must be pricked well and weighted or they will slide and puff off shape.
- Inverted patty-tinsPatty-tins are small tartlet or muffin cups. Turn the tray upside down, drape a round of puff paste over each dome, prick it all over, and bake; you get free-standing cups rather than pastry pressed into a mould. Chill the draped pastry for 20 minutes first so it holds while the oven sets it.
- A hot ovenFor puff paste read 425–450F. Bake until the layers are set and evenly coloured, 12–18 minutes depending on the size of the tins, then lift the shells off while still warm.
- Which macaroonsThese are dry almond macaroons of the amaretti type — crisp, storable, meant to be crushed. Modern soft coconut macaroons will not work; they are moist and will turn the mixture to paste. Six macaroons will give anything from about a third to three-quarters of a cup of crumbs depending on their size, so judge by the look of the mixture.
- "Roll" themCrush the macaroons to fine crumbs with a rolling pin between sheets of paper, or pulse briefly in a processor. Coarse fragments stay gritty because the topping is barely cooked.
- The topping is only brownedTwo or three minutes under a high oven or a broiler sets the surface but leaves the yolk mixture underneath little more than warm. Use pasteurised eggs if that matters to you, or leave the tarts in until the filling is set through and puffed rather than pulling them at first colour.
- Sugar and balanceHalf a cup of sugar to two yolks is sweet by modern taste, and the tarts also carry marmalade or jelly. A third of a cup is enough, especially with a tart marmalade underneath.
- Yield and timingSix to eight small tarts. Assemble and brown them shortly before serving — the pastry softens quickly once the jelly and the moist topping go in.
Macaroon tarts belong to a long tradition of thrift dressed as elegance: dry almond macaroons kept for weeks in a tin, and stale ones were routinely pounded into crumbs to thicken puddings, line charlottes, or, as here, to carry a few yolks and some citrus into a filling. The almond macaroon itself is generally traced to Italian convent baking and reached English and American kitchens well before the coconut version that now dominates the name. The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern and magazine publisher of the same name, and its pastry chapter is aimed at a household cook expected to handle puff paste as a matter of course — the recipe assumes she owns patty-tins, knows what "a hot oven" means in her own range, and needs no more instruction than a paragraph.