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Almond Paste
Blanch some Jordan almonds the day before they are required for use and allow them to remain in cold water. Soak two-thirds of this quantity of clean gum-dragon in a jar with a little water long enough to allow it to absorb all the water. Pound the almonds to a pulp, adding a little lemon juice to prevent them from oiling. When they are like a smooth paste, rub them through a sieve. Having done this, put the almonds into a sugar-boiler with some icing-sugar and stir well with a wooden spoon. This should be done briskly so that the paste should not be allowed to color. When it does not stick to the sides of the pan, it may be taken off the fire. The gum must now be squeezed through strong cloth, rubbed upon a slab and gradually worked into paste, together with a little more of the sugar. This kind of paste is usually employed for making baskets, etc., which, when filled with strawberries and cream, or any other kind of fruit make a pretty dish.
This is a pastry-shop pastillage rather than a marzipan you would eat by the slice: the gum makes it stiff enough to model into baskets that hold their shape. Two things decide whether it works — keeping the almonds cold and acidulated so they never release their oil, and keeping the pan off high heat so the paste stays white.
- Jordan almondsThese are large, flat Spanish-type sweet almonds, not the candy-coated confection sold under that name today. Any good-quality whole raw almond will do; buy them skin-on and blanch them yourself, as pre-blanched nuts are often dry and prone to oiling.
- Gum-dragonAn old English name for gum tragacanth, the dried sap of Astragalus shrubs, still sold to cake decorators as tragacanth powder. It is edible and food-legal; its job here is purely structural. Modern substitutes are CMC (tylose) powder or gum paste mix, used at the same tiny proportion.
- The ambiguous proportion"Two-thirds of this quantity of clean gum-dragon" is unclear as written, and two-thirds the weight of the almonds in tragacanth would be unworkably stiff; it is not certain what quantity the fraction refers to. Pastillage uses only a small proportion of gum, so work from a current formula for the gum quantity.
- Sugar-boilerA deep, heavy copper pan, usually untinned, used for sugar work. A heavy stainless saucepan is the modern stand-in. "Icing-sugar" is confectioners' sugar; today's version contains cornstarch, which the older kind did not.
- Low heat, and whyKeep the pan over gentle heat. Almond paste browns quickly and irreversibly, and the recipe insists the paste "should not be allowed to color."
- Lemon juiceThe acid and the water it carries keep the ground almonds from breaking into oil under pressure. A food processor works, but pulse in short bursts and stop while the mixture is still cool to the touch; a warm bowl is what causes oiling.
- Squeezing the gumSoaked tragacanth becomes a stiff, lumpy mucilage that must be forced through strong cloth or a fine sieve to remove grit and undissolved specks. Skip this and every lump shows as a bump in the finished basket.
- Working and storingKnead on a marble slab dusted with confectioners' sugar until the paste is smooth and no longer tacky, then wrap airtight at once — exposed pastillage skins over within minutes. Modelled pieces need a day or two in dry air to harden before they are filled with fruit and cream, and should be assembled shortly before serving.
Modelling paste of this kind sits at the point where the nineteenth-century pastry kitchen turned into sculpture. Almond paste sweetened and bound with sugar is very old — marzipan is generally traced to Europe through the medieval Arab and Iberian confectioners, though the transmission is less settled than often implied — but the addition of gum tragacanth, which sets hard and takes paint and gilding, produced the pastillage of the French pièce montée, the edible architecture that crowned a formal dinner. Oscar Tschirky's book, published from the Waldorf in the 1890s, records that hotel repertoire at its height, when a dessert course might well arrive in a container the kitchen had built itself: baskets, shells, swans, filled at the last moment with strawberries and cream. The instructions assume a pastry cook with a marble slab, a copper sugar-boiler and time to blanch almonds the day before, which is a fair sketch of what a large hotel brigade of the period actually had.