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Favors: Baskets
Macaroon Baskets Make macaroons having them less than one inch in diameter. Cook one cup sugar, half a cup of boiling water, and a few grains cream of tartar until syrup begins to discolor. Set saucepan in pan of cold water to instantly stop the boiling, then place in saucepan of hot water. Dip edges of macaroons in syrup, and place close together to form a circle large enough for the base of the basket. Around the edge fit a row of macaroons and over this a second row to make the sides of the basket, dipping the edges in syrup that they may stick together. When the basket is made, the syrup remaining in saucepan may be poured on a buttered tin, and kept in a warm place. As soon as candy can be handled, pull until glossy, and shape to form a handle for the basket. Dip the ends in melted syrup, and attach them to the sides of the basket. The baskets may be large or small, and used for ice cream or for holding candies. Pecan Baskets Follow recipe for Glace Nuts, using pecans. As nuts are dipped, fasten two together for the bottom of the basket. Place others upright around the edge for the sides of the basket. Fashion handle as suggested in recipe for Macaroon Baskets, and fill with glace strawberries.
This is construction work more than cooking: small almond macaroons cemented into a basket with caramel, finished with a pulled-sugar handle. Two things decide whether it works — the stage the syrup reaches, and how fast you assemble before it sets.
- The syrup stage"Until syrup begins to discolor" is past hard crack and at the first colouring of caramel, somewhere in the region of 320F, though the recipe gives no temperature and assumes the eye rather than a thermometer. Below that the glue stays tacky and the basket sags; much beyond it the sugar darkens and turns bitter.
- Stopping the boilThe cold-water bath is not optional; residual heat in the pan will otherwise carry the syrup on past caramel. Dip the base only long enough to stop the boiling, then move it to the hot-water bath, which keeps the syrup fluid and dippable while you work.
- Cream of tartarA few grains, meaning a pinch rather than a measured spoonful, inverts some of the sucrose and helps keep the syrup from crystallizing while it is held warm and repeatedly disturbed.
- Macaroon size"Less than one inch" is deliberate. The macaroons intended are most likely the small almond-paste kind of the period rather than coconut haystacks; make them small and bake them dry enough to hold their shape under a handle's weight.
- Pulling the handleThe recipe has you keep the poured syrup in a warm place so that it stays workable; it is dangerously hot, so wait until it can be lifted without running, and use buttered hands or lightly oiled gloves. Pull until glossy, then twist and bend over a jar or rolling pin to set the curve.
- Glace nutsThe pecan version depends on a separate recipe elsewhere in the book: nuts dipped in the same hard-crack syrup and left to set glassy. The dipping syrup is the mortar, so the nuts must be joined while it is still liquid on the surface.
- HumidityHard-crack sugar pulls moisture from damp air and goes sticky within hours. Build these on a dry day and as close to serving as possible; storing them in the refrigerator will ruin them.
Favors of this kind belong to the elaborate turn-of-the-century American dinner table, where each guest found a small edible construction at their place — a basket, a cornucopia, a sugared nest — meant to be admired first and eaten last. The Candy Cook Book came out of the Boston Cooking School tradition, which treated confectionery as a teachable branch of domestic science, with thermometer stages and syrup temperatures set down precisely. The macaroon here is the older almond-paste kind, long a staple of the confectioner's counter and easy to bake at home, and it survives in this recipe less as a cookie than as a building block. What the page really records is a moment when pulled sugar — a professional confectioner's skill — was apparently considered a reasonable thing to ask of a home cook.