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Hickory-Nut Macaroons
Take meats of hickory-nuts, pound fine and add mixed ground spice and nutmeg; make frosting as for cakes, stir meats and spices in, putting in enough to make it convenient to handle; flour the hands and make the mixture into balls the size of nutmegs, lay them on buttered tins, giving room to spread, and bake in a quick oven. These are delicious. - Mrs. Walter Mitchell,
A meringue drop cookie in which hickory nuts stand in for the almonds of a true macaroon. The whole recipe hinges on one judgment the original leaves to you: how much ground nut the icing will carry.
- "Frosting as for cakes"In cookbooks of this period this usually means an uncooked egg-white icing — whites beaten stiff with confectioners' sugar, on the order of one white to a cup of sugar, sometimes with a few drops of lemon. It is not buttercream. Beat it to a stiff, glossy state before any nut goes in.
- The consistency is the recipeAdd pounded nuts until the mass is just stiff enough to roll between floured palms without slumping. Too little nut and the balls spread into flat wafers; too much and they crumble dry, because there is no flour or fat binding them beyond the meringue.
- Hickory nutsShagbark hickory meats were a gathered, seasonal ingredient in the nineteenth-century Midwest and South and are rarely sold today. Pecans, a close botanical relative, are the standard substitute and give nearly the same flavor; walnuts are sharper but workable. Grind them fine and dry — a food processor pulsed briefly, not run until oily.
- "Mixed ground spice"A period blend along the lines of cinnamon, allspice, cloves and mace, with the nutmeg called for separately. A half teaspoon of mixed spice plus a quarter teaspoon of nutmeg per egg white is in keeping; the spice should sit behind the nut, not in front of it.
- "The size of nutmegs"A whole nutmeg is roughly three-quarters of an inch across, so these are small — well under a teaspoon of mixture each. The yield depends entirely on how much nut the icing takes.
- OvenA quick oven is generally glossed as a hot oven, roughly 400–425F, which will scorch a sugar-and-egg-white dough before the inside sets. Modern practice for meringue cookies is 300–325F for 18–25 minutes, until dry to the touch and barely colored.
- The tinsButtered sheets were the usual direction, and these cookies stick badly regardless (paper was also used in the period for macaroons). Parchment paper solves it outright and lets the meringue release clean.
- KeepingStore airtight the day they are made. Meringue-based cookies pull moisture from humid air and go soft and tacky within a day or two otherwise.
Hickory-nut cookery is one of the clearest markers of an American regional cookbook. The shells are thick and the meats maddening to extract, so recipes calling for it belong to households that gathered their own nuts in autumn and put them to use through the winter. The word macaroon descends from the Italian maccarone and originally meant an almond-and-egg-white confection; by the time The Dixie Cook Book was compiled in the 1880s, American cooks had extended the name to any small egg-white cookie built on ground nuts or coconut, and substituted whatever the woodlot provided. The attribution to Mrs. Walter Mitchell is typical of the book's method: it is a compiled community cookbook, assembling contributed household recipes under named credit, and its measurements assume a cook who already knows what her cake frosting should look like.