No. 3380

Angelica Macaroons

Macarons d'Angelique

Crush one pound of almonds with a pound and a quarter of sugar and seven egg-whites; make a smooth but not too fine paste; place it in a copper basin and heat while stirring continuously with a spatula; when warm enough remove it at once from the fire to stir in five ounces of finely chopped angelica. Range this paste on a paper-covered baking sheet in small macaroon shapes an inch and a quarter in diameter; dampen the surfaces with a slightly wet cloth, powder over with sugar and bake in a slack oven.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A straightforward almond macaroon paste enriched with candied angelica. Two things decide the result: how warm the paste gets before the angelica goes in, and how gently it bakes.

Slack ovenA slack oven is the coolest working range, roughly 275–300°F. These are meant to dry and set to a pale blond, not colour; much hotter and the surface will brown and crack before the interior firms.
Heating the pasteThe copper basin is a conductor, not a cooking vessel. The recipe says only "when warm enough" and to take it off the fire at once, so keep it barely warm rather than hot. A heavy stainless bowl over barely simmering water gives the same control with far less risk of scrambling the whites.
AngelicaThis means candied angelica stem, the bright green confection once widely sold by confectioners and now largely a specialist item. It is sticky; chill it and chop with an oiled knife, and dust the pieces with a little of the recipe's sugar so they disperse rather than clump.
The almondsBlanched sweet almonds, skins off. The recipe has them crushed together with the sugar and the whites, as would have been done in a mortar; a food processor does it, but pulse and scrape rather than run it, or the almonds oil and the paste turns greasy. "Smooth but not too fine" means a little grain is wanted.
Egg whitesSeven modern large whites come to about 7 fl oz, a scant cup; period eggs may well have run smaller. Add them in stages — the paste should just hold a soft shape, and almond absorbency varies.
Paper-covered baking sheetParchment. The original assumed the macaroons would be peeled off after cooling, sometimes with the paper's underside dampened to release them; parchment removes that step entirely.
Damping and sugaringThe wet cloth and dusting of sugar are what give macaroons their crackled, slightly glassy top. A fine spray of water and a sieve of caster sugar does the same and is easier to control than a cloth.
YieldAt an inch and a quarter each, this quantity of paste makes several dozen macaroons. They keep a week in a tin.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) was Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years running the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York, and its petits fours chapter is essentially a French confectioner's repertoire transplanted whole. Angelica — the candied stems of Angelica archangelica — was one of the standard decorative sweetmeats of nineteenth-century pastry work, valued as much for its emphatic green as its faintly musky, juniper-like flavour, and it turns up throughout the book studded into cakes and cut into leaves for garnish. The plant is northern European and its confection is generally traced to French and English still-rooms, where it was candied at home before commercial confectioners took it over. Its near-disappearance from ordinary kitchens is one of the reasons a recipe this simple now reads as obscure: the technique is unremarkable, but the ingredient that gives it its name has quietly left the shelf.