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Macaroons Flavored
Beat the yolks of four eggs light together with one pound of powdered white sugar and whisk the whites of four eggs to a stiff froth. Beat into the beaten eggs and sugar the grated peel of one lemon and half a teaspoonful of grated nutmet. Mix in lastly and in small quantities the frothed whites and six ounces of flour. Roll the mixture into small balls, rub over with butter, lay them on a buttered-paper leaving a space between each, and bake in a hot oven.
A drop cookie in the shape of a macaroon rather than a true one — there are no almonds or coconut here at all, just eggs, sugar, lemon, nutmeg and a little flour. The method as written is terse, and two of its instructions need adjusting before the batter will behave.
- It will not roll into ballsFour yolks, four whisked whites, a pound of sugar and only six ounces of flour give a slack batter, closer to sponge-cake mixture than dough. Drop it in teaspoonfuls or pipe it; the direction to roll each ball and rub it with butter suggests a much stiffer mixture than these quantities produce.
- "Powdered white sugar"In this period the phrase means granulated sugar ground fine, not today's confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Superfine (caster) sugar is the correct substitute; a pound is about 2 1/4 cups.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; 'hot oven' is usually read today as somewhere around 400-425F. At that heat a sugar-heavy batter colors fast — start checking at about 10 minutes, and pull them when the edges are set and pale gold rather than browned.
- Buttered paperParchment, unbuttered, does the job better. Butter on paper under a high-sugar batter tends to fry the bottoms.
- Six ounces of flourRoughly 1 1/3 cups measured by scoop, but weigh it if you can — the ratio of flour to egg is what keeps these from spreading into a single sheet.
- Nutmeg"Nutmet" is a typesetting error. Half a teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg against a whole lemon's zest is assertive; it is meant to be.
- Folding orderThe whites go in last and in small quantities for a reason. Yolks beaten with that much sugar make a heavy base, so sacrifice a spoonful of the whites to loosen it before folding in the rest, alternating with the flour.
- YieldAbout three to four dozen small cookies. Leave a good inch between them; they spread more than the recipe implies.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection gathers the working repertoire of the Waldorf's kitchens, and its baking chapters show how loosely the word macaroon was already being used. The name is generally traced to the Italian maccarone, and the original article — the Italian amaretto and its French descendant — is a paste of ground almonds and sugar bound with egg white, with no flour and no yolk. In this book the term covers a lemon-and-nutmeg drop cookie, which travels under it without comment.