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Macaroon Puddings
Place three-quarters of a pound of macaroons in a basin and pour over a pint and a half of boiling cream. Leave until cold, then beat them up with a wooden spoon. Beat the yolks and whites of six eggs and mix them in with the macaroons, adding sugar to taste and a wineglassful and a half of pale brandy. Butter some moulds, fill them with the mixture, and bake for ten minutes. When they are cooked, turn them out onto a dish, dust them over with fine sugar, and serve.
A baked almond-macaroon custard, essentially a bread pudding in which the bread is cookies. The original assumes a cook who knows custard, so it omits the two things that decide the outcome: a water bath and a real baking time.
- The macaroonsThese are crisp almond macaroons — sugar, egg white and ground almonds — not the soft coconut mounds or French macaron shells. Italian amaretti are the closest reliable stand-in; 12 oz is roughly 340 g.
- MeasuresA pint and a half of cream is 3 cups (about 700 ml) by American measure; reckoned in imperial pints it would be nearer 850 ml. A wineglassful is conventionally taken as about 2 fl oz, though the measure varied, so a glass and a half is roughly 3 fl oz (90 ml) of brandy — assertive but in balance with six eggs and that much cream.
- Scald, do not boil hardScald rather than boil hard -- The recipe calls for boiling cream, but bringing it just to the point of steaming and pouring it over the macaroons is the safer reading. Cooling completely before the eggs go in is not optional: hot cream plus beaten eggs makes scrambled egg, not custard.
- Bake in a water bathThe recipe says only "bake." Set the buttered moulds in a roasting pan, pour in boiling water to halfway up their sides, and bake at 325F. Direct oven heat on a custard this rich will curdle the edges before the centre sets.
- TimeTen minutes will not set individual custards of any useful size. Small ramekins need 25-35 minutes; the centre should still tremble slightly, and an instant-read thermometer in the middle should show 170-175F.
- Turning outRest the moulds 10 minutes out of the water, then run a thin knife around the edge before inverting. Butter the moulds heavily and dust them with fine sugar first — it gives a thin caramel-ish skin that helps them release cleanly.
- YieldRoughly eight to ten small moulds of about 5 oz each, depending on how much the macaroons swell. The mixture also bakes well as one large pudding, but that wants closer to an hour in the water bath.
Oscar Tschirky was never the Waldorf's chef — he was its maître d'hôtel — but his 1896 collection gathered the hotel's kitchen repertoire alongside a great deal of standard Anglo-American and French cookery, and this pudding belongs squarely to the latter. Puddings built by soaking a dry baked good in scalded cream and binding it with eggs run through English cookery for centuries, from bread and biscuit puddings to the ratafia and macaroon versions that turn up in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century receipt books; the macaroon simply brings its own almond flavour and sugar with it, so the cook adds little more than brandy. Crisp almond macaroons and ratafias were commonly kept to hand in kitchens of this sort — served with wine, crumbled over trifles and creams, and used, as here, as a ready-made flavouring base.