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Swiss Macaroons
Blanch and chop one pound of sweet and four ounces of bitter almonds, place them on a dish, mix with them half a pound of powdered sugar, and place them in a cool oven. When they are lightly browned place the almonds in a basin and mix with them a pound and a half more sugar, and enough of whisked whites of eggs to knead the whole into a paste. Spread a sheet of wafer-paper over a baking sheet, mould the above mixture into small, round cakes, dipping the finger in water to prevent them sticking, and lay the cakes on the paper. Leave a space between each cake as they will spread while baking. Place two thin fillets of almonds on each cake, brush them lightly over with a paste-brush dipped in water, and lay the cakes on the paper. When they are cooked leave the macaroons until they are cold, and then trim the paper off neatly round the edges with a knife.
This is a nineteenth-century confectioner's macaroon built on a blend of sweet and bitter almonds, and the bitter almonds are the problem. The rest of the method is conventional, but the quantity called for puts the recipe outside what can be made today.
- Bitter almonds are the reason to stopBitter almonds (the kernels of Prunus dulcis var. amara) contain amygdalin, which the enzyme emulsin converts to hydrogen cyanide once the nut is crushed, chopped or wetted. The recipe calls for four ounces of them, chopped, which is on the order of a hundred kernels.
- The quantity is not decorativeReported cyanide yields for raw bitter almonds run roughly 4-9 mg of hydrogen cyanide per kernel. Four ounces is therefore hundreds of milligrams distributed across a tray of small cakes, with no way to know how much lands in any one macaroon. Children are affected at far smaller doses than adults.
- A cool oven does not make them safeHeat can drive off some hydrogen cyanide and denature the enzyme, but the drying stage here is a deliberately gentle one, and neither it nor the final bake is a controlled detoxification step. Commercial bitter-almond products are processed and assayed precisely because home baking is not reliable.
- Why the recipe existed at allBitter almond was the standard source of marzipan and macaroon flavour before almond extract was industrialised, and confectioners used it in small measured proportion to sweet almonds. Sale of raw bitter almonds to the public is restricted in the United States, and cyanide content in almond products is regulated in the EU and UK, so the ingredient is difficult to obtain in this form today.
- Wafer paperThe "wafer-paper" of the original is edible rice or potato-starch paper, still sold for cake decorating. It is the one element of the recipe that has not changed, and it explains the final instruction to trim round each cake with a knife.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for almond macaroons flavoured with sweet almonds and a measured commercial almond extract. Do not attempt to substitute proportionally into the text above.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection was assembled at a moment when the American hotel kitchen still worked from European confectioners' manuals, and this macaroon is straight out of that tradition: sweet almonds for body, a fixed fraction of bitter almonds for the sharp, marzipan-like perfume that we now get from a bottle. The "Swiss" label may well have attached loosely in nineteenth-century cookery to fine pastry work of the sort often associated with Swiss and Austrian confectioners, who are said to have staffed the pastry rooms of grand hotels in New York, London and Paris; if so, it is probably a claim about style rather than about origin, though the recipe itself offers no evidence either way. Bitter almonds fell out of domestic use over the following decades as synthesised and rectified benzaldehyde-based extracts became cheap and as regulators moved against the raw kernels, so recipes of this kind survive mainly as evidence of how flavour was sourced before the flavour industry existed.