Have one pound of almonds, one pound of sugar, and eight egg-yolks; pound or mash the almonds in a machine with the sugar so as to reduce them to a fine powder, then strain through a twelve mesh sieve (Fig.96), put them into the mortar, and mix in well the yolks adding them little by little; pound all up together so as to obtain a very fine paste, having it quite thick.
This is one of Ranhofer's foundation pastes, listed among the elementary preparations a Delmonico's cook was expected to have on hand. The method is sound as grinding technique, but the finished paste is never heated.
The Epicurean (1894) was Charles Ranhofer's summation of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its Elementary Methods section reads like a stockroom inventory: stocks, glazes, forcemeats and a whole family of almond pastes, each numbered so that later recipes could simply refer back. Almond paste itself is far older than the book, generally traced through medieval Arab and Italian confectionery to the marzipan of Sicily, Spain and the German towns, where sugar and almonds arrived together along the same trade routes. The egg-yolk version belongs to the French patisserie tradition that Ranhofer trained in, where yolks were added for richness, colour and a paste soft enough to pipe or roll thin. That he gives three variants in a row — with cooked sugar, with yolks, with gum tragacanth — shows how differently the same two ingredients had to behave depending on whether they were being baked, moulded into fruits, or dried hard for ornamental work.