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Macaroon Cake
Warm some butter, mix it with some sugar, work to a cream; beat in some eggs, add some milk, baking-powder, and enough flour so that you will be able to roll it. Work the dough thoroughly and put on a buttered baking-sheet. Place in a moderate oven, bake slightly, as it will have to be baked again when used for macaroon paste.
This is not a finished cake but a component: a rolled sweet dough, part-baked, that later carries a macaroon (almond paste) topping and goes back into the oven. Oscar gives no quantities anywhere, which was normal in a book written by and for people who already knew the formula.
- The hinge: underbake itThe base gets a second bake once the macaroon paste is on it. Take it out when it is set and barely coloured — pale straw, not golden. A fully baked sheet will be dry and hard after the second firing.
- "A moderate oven"350F/175C. For a thin part-baked sheet, 10-12 minutes is usually enough; judge by colour rather than the clock.
- No quantities givenThe proportions are left to the cook. A dough of this type that will roll runs roughly 1 part butter, 1 part sugar, 2 parts flour by weight, with 1 egg and a spoonful or two of milk per 8 oz of flour, plus a teaspoon of baking powder. Treat that as a starting point, not as Oscar's own figures.
- "Macaroon paste"The topping meant here is the classic almond macaroon mixture — ground blanched almonds, sugar and egg white, sometimes with a little egg yolk or rice flour. Modern almond paste or marzipan loosened with egg white does the same job.
- Work the dough thoroughly, but coldThe instruction to work it well matters for a rollable sheet, but butter-and-sugar doughs go slack fast. Chill the dough 30 minutes before rolling and roll it directly onto the buttered sheet or on parchment.
- Baking-sheet, not a cake tinThis is meant as a flat sheet rather than a layer cake; the recipe does not say how the finished piece was cut. Roll it about 1/4 inch thick.
- Baking powder in 1896Commercial baking powders of the period varied in strength and were single-acting rather than double-acting. Use standard baking powder and do not let the rolled sheet sit around before baking.
Oscar Tschirky, the maitre d'hotel whose name fronts this 1896 volume, produced a book in which many entries read like notes passed between professionals: a technique, an order of operations, and no weights at all. Macaroons themselves are generally traced to Italian almond-and-egg-white confections -- the word comes through French macaron from Italian maccarone -- and by the late nineteenth century almond paste was also spread over a pastry base and cut into bars rather than only piped into single cookies. A two-stage construction of this kind, a part-baked sweet dough finished with a rich topping, let the base be prepared ahead and finished as needed.