Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Macaroon Mirletons
Macaroon Mirletons
Break into a powder enough macaroons to make three ounces in weight, place it in a basin with the yolks of four eggs and the whites of two, stir in four ounces of powdered loaf sugar, half an ounce of pounded candied orange-flowers and a small sprinkling of salt. Mix these for a few minutes; then add two ounces of warmed butter and the whites of two eggs whipped to a froth. Have some pans ready and line them with puff-paste, fill them with the mixture, dust them over with powdered sugar, let it melt in the oven, then dust over coarse sugar and bake to a light brown in a slake oven. When they are done, take out and serve them either hot or cold as may be required.
A Norman almond tartlet rebuilt from crushed macaroons rather than ground almonds. The recipe assumes a cook who already knows how to line tartlet tins with puff paste, and it is vague about oven heat, so a few decisions have to be made for it.
- The macaroonsThese are old-style almond macaroons — crisp, chewy, made of almonds, sugar and egg white, closest today to Italian amaretti or French macaron coques (not the filled sandwich cookies). Three ounces is about 85 g, pulverised in a food processor to a fine sandy powder.
- Loaf sugarSugar was sold in hard cones and broken off as needed; "powdered loaf sugar" means the cone scraped and sifted fine. Use 4 oz (115 g) caster or superfine sugar. The "coarse sugar" of the final dusting is pearl or sanding sugar.
- Candied orange-flowersWhole orange blossoms candied in syrup, a standard confectioner's stock in 1896 and now nearly impossible to buy. Half an ounce is about 15 g; the workable substitute is a teaspoon of orange-flower water plus a little finely chopped candied orange peel, added with the sugar.
- The eggs, in orderFour yolks and two whole whites go into the base; two further whites are whipped and folded in at the end with the melted butter. Fold, do not stir, or the froth that lightens the filling collapses and the tartlets bake dense.
- Warmed butterTwo ounces (55 g) melted and cooled to barely warm. Hot butter will cook the yolks and deflate the whipped whites going in alongside it.
- "A slake oven"Almost certainly a printer's slip for slack oven, conventionally read today as somewhere around 300-325F. That suits an egg-and-almond filling, but it is too cool to lift raw puff paste, so — a departure from the text — blind-bake the lined tins at 400F until the pastry is set and dry before filling and dropping the heat.
- The two sugar dustingsThe first dusting is meant to melt in the oven's heat into a thin glaze; the coarse sugar goes on top of that and stays granular. Do the first dusting as the tartlets go in, the second a few minutes later once the surface has glossed.
- YieldEnough filling for about a dozen tartlets in a standard muffin or tartlet tin, baking 20-25 minutes at the lower heat until set and lightly coloured. Best the day they are made; the puff paste softens overnight.
Mirlitons are a Rouen speciality — puff-pastry tartlets filled with an almond-and-egg cream, dusted with sugar and usually finished with three almonds on top — and the name is generally traced to the mirliton, a reed pipe or kazoo, though the connection to the pastry is guesswork rather than record. Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) reflects the thoroughly French orientation of American hotel cookery at the end of the century: the Waldorf's kitchen worked from the classical repertoire, and provincial French pastries appear alongside the oysters and terrapin without any explanation offered to the reader. Crushed macaroons in place of freshly ground almonds is a common feature of nineteenth-century pastry fillings, though why this recipe calls for them here is not stated.