No. 3384

Dutch Macaroons

Macarons Hollandais

Peel one pound of almonds; pound them with two and a half pounds of icing sugar, part of it flavored with vanilla (No. 3165) and add slowly ten egg-whites to obtain a very fine paste; put it into a vessel and work to give body. Push it through a pocket on a paper-covered baking sheet into small oval macaroons one inch in length, and keep them in the heater for twelve hours, then remove and split them in two with a small kitchen knife and cook in a very slack oven.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's proportions are for a professional pastry department: a pound of almonds and two and a half pounds of sugar will give you several hundred small cakes. Everything hinges on the long drying period before baking, which is what lets the knife-split top open cleanly.

Scale it downQuarter the recipe and you have 4 oz almonds, 10 oz icing sugar and 2 to 3 egg whites, a manageable home batch. Eggs were not standardised in the 1890s and whites may have run smaller than a modern large egg, so add them gradually and stop when the paste pipes without slumping.
Peeling almonds"Peel" means blanch: cover in boiling water for a minute, drain, and slip off the skins. Dry them thoroughly before pounding or the paste will be slack.
Pound, or grind carefullyA food processor replaces the mortar, but almonds ground alone turn to butter. Pulse them with the icing sugar from the start, in short bursts, until the mixture is powder-fine.
Vanilla sugarNo. 3165 is Ranhofer's cross-reference for vanilla-flavoured sugar, the usual method being to keep split vanilla beans in icing sugar until it takes the scent. Vanilla extract works, but add it with the whites rather than to the dry mix.
"Push it through a pocket"A pocket is a piping bag. Use a plain round tip about half an inch across and pipe short ovals, well spaced, on parchment.
"Keep them in the heater"The heater is the warming closet above or beside a coal range, a gently warm dry space. A modern equivalent is an oven with only the pilot or light on, or simply a dry room at cool temperature; twelve hours is to form a firm skin, not to cook them. They are ready when the surface is dull and dry to a light touch.
Splitting the topsThe direction to split each dried macaroon appears to be meant to open a seam that the expanding interior forces apart in the oven, giving a ridged, cracked top. Cut through the dried skin rather than right down to the sheet.
"A very slack oven"Slack means low, conventionally somewhere in the 250-300°F range, and very slack lower still, so aim at the bottom of that band. Bake until set and barely coloured. Anything hotter browns them and defeats the twelve hours of drying.
Getting them off the paperOne old bakeshop trick was to dampen the underside of the paper with a little water and let the steam release the cakes. Parchment makes this unnecessary, but let them cool fully before lifting or the bottoms tear.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he assembled from some three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it sits in a chapter of petits fours that a large restaurant would have turned out daily. Almond-and-sugar macaroons are far older than the French sandwich macaron familiar now; they are a meringue-and-nut confection documented across Italy, France, Spain and the Low Countries for centuries, though what Ranhofer meant by the "Hollandais" designation the recipe does not say. The long rest in the warming closet is a version of what pastry cooks still call croûtage, the deliberate drying of a piped surface before baking, and here the top is split by hand rather than left to crack in the oven.