No. 138

Macaroon Paste

Pate a Macarons

Made with one pound of peeled and well dried almonds, three quarters of a pound of powdered sugar, a quarter of a pound of vanilla sugar and eight egg-whites. Pound the almonds with the sugar and part of the whites, so as to obtain a not too fine paste, then gradually add the remainder of the whites; work the paste well to have it obtain plenty of consistence.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a component paste rather than a finished cookie, and it behaves quite differently from a modern macaron batter: the whites are never whipped, so all the structure comes from grinding the almonds and sugar into a stiff, cohesive mass. Get the paste stiff enough to hold a piped shape and the rest follows.

The hinge: work it stiffRanhofer's "plenty of consistence" is the whole instruction. Add the whites in stages and stop while the paste still holds a ribbon on the spoon; a slack paste spreads flat in the oven and gives you almond wafers rather than macaroons.
Almonds "peeled and well dried"Blanched almonds, skinned and then left to dry thoroughly — overnight on a tray, or twenty minutes in a 200F oven and cooled. Damp almonds turn oily under grinding and the paste weeps.
Pounding without a mortarA food processor works, but pulse the almonds with the sugar and only a little of the white, in short bursts, scraping down often. Sustained running heats the nuts to butter. Ranhofer explicitly wants a paste "not too fine" — a little texture is what he asks for.
Powdered sugar then and nowIn 1894 this meant loaf sugar crushed and sifted — pure sucrose, no anti-caking starch. Modern confectioners' sugar contains about 3 percent cornstarch, which slightly dries the paste; superfine (caster) sugar is the closer match here.
Vanilla sugarNot sold in most American supermarkets. Bury two split pods in a pound of sugar for a week, or grind a pod with a few tablespoons of the sugar and sift. A quarter pound is 4 oz, so this is a strongly vanilla-scented paste.
Weights and the eight whitesOne pound almonds, 12 oz powdered sugar, 4 oz vanilla sugar. Eight whites come to roughly 8 fl oz (about 1 cup) with modern large eggs; egg sizes were not standardised in the 1890s, so add the last whites gradually and judge by consistency, as the recipe directs.
Baking, if you take it that farThe book gives no oven because this is a base paste. Piped in rounds on parchment and baked at 300-325F for 18-25 minutes, until set and lightly colored, is the usual treatment; the sugar is high enough that a hotter oven browns the edges before the center sets.
YieldAbout 2 1/2 lb of paste — roughly 40 to 50 macaroons of 1 1/2 inches, or enough for several small tart or bombe moulds.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer put this in the Elementary Methods section of The Epicurean (1894). The word macaron reaches French from the Italian maccarone, and the almond-and-egg-white confection is generally traced to Italian convent and court kitchens before it settled into French pastry practice; the sandwiched, ganache-filled macaron familiar today is a later Parisian development, so nothing here calls for whipped meringue or aged whites. The instruction to pound rather than grind suggests that the pastry chef controlled texture by how far he took that pounding o specspecify a paste "not too fine."