No. 127

Almond Paste with Gum Tragacanth

Pate d'Amandes a la Gomme Adragante

Put three ounces of gum tragacanth to steep in two gills of water for twenty-four hours, then strain forcibly through a piece of linen. Pour this gum on a marble slab and work with the hand to have it acquire a body, incorporating in slowly two pounds of icing sugar, then add one pound of pounded almonds and the juice of a lemon strained through a sieve; beat the paste well and pour it into a vessel or stone pot; closing hermetically; keep in a very cool place to use when needed. This paste may be colored red, green, orange or any other color.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a gum paste in the confectioner's sense: an almond-sugar dough stiffened with tragacanth so it can be modelled, rolled thin, or cut into decorative pieces. Nothing is cooked, so the texture is decided entirely by how the gum is hydrated.

The hinge: hydrate the gum fullyTragacanth swells slowly and enormously, and undissolved specks will show up as hard grit in the finished paste. The full twenty-four hours and the forcing through linen are both non-negotiable; a fine nylon sieve or a doubled square of muslin does the same job.
Two gills is one cupA gill is half a cup, so the recipe calls for one cup of water. Be aware that three ounces of gum to one cup is a far heavier proportion than modern gum paste uses (often a teaspoon or two per pound of sugar), and a cup of water will not wet three ounces of tragacanth into anything strainable. Treat the water as a minimum and add more until you have a thick, pourable mucilage.
Icing sugarConfectioners' sugar. Modern brands usually carry around 3 percent cornstarch, which may make the paste slightly drier and firmer than Ranhofer's would have been; the difference is not worth correcting for.
Pounded almondsBlanched almonds ground to a flour, not marzipan and not almond butter. Commercial blanched almond flour works; if grinding your own, pulse with a spoonful of the icing sugar to keep the nuts from turning oily.
Why a marble slabMarble stays cool and does not absorb sugar syrup, so the paste can be worked at length without warming and weeping oil from the almonds. A cold granite counter or a chilled sheet pan turned upside down substitutes well.
Closing hermeticallyAirtight. The paste skins over and hardens fast once exposed, so press cling film directly onto the surface before sealing the container. Refrigerated, it keeps for weeks; bring it back to room temperature and knead before using.
ColouringUse gel or paste colours rather than liquid ones. Water-based colour added at the end slackens the paste and undoes the body you built up on the slab.
YieldSomething over three pounds of paste, which is a professional quantity for modelling flowers, fruits and set pieces. Quarter the recipe for home use.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the working practice of Delmonico's kitchen in New York, and the Elementary Methods chapter is essentially a manual of pastry-department stock preparations: a run of almond pastes in sequence, each bound differently for a different job. Egg yolk gives richness, pistachio gives colour and flavour, and gum tragacanth gives the one thing the others cannot -- a paste that dries hard and holds an edge, the material of pastillage baskets, sugar flowers and the architectural centrepieces expected on a nineteenth-century banquet table. Tragacanth itself is a gum exuded by Astragalus shrubs of Iran and Turkey, tapped and dried into ribbons, and it was long used to bind lozenges and pills before it was set to holding up spun-sugar scenery. It survives on modern labels as E413.