No. 3396

Pistachio Tourons

Tourons aux Pistaches

Obtain a fine firm paste with half a pound of pounded almonds, three-quarters of a pound of sugar and three or four egg-whites. Roll it out to a quarter of an inch in thickness, then cover with royal icing (No. 101), into which mix ten ounces of chopped pistachios and half a grated orange peel. Cut this paste into small sticks each two and a quarter inches long by five-eighths of an inch in width; range them on a buttered and floured baking sheet and cook in a slow oven.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A stiff almond-paste dough, iced and cut into fingers, from Charles Ranhofer's petits fours chapter. The instructions assume you already have royal icing on hand and a cook's judgment about how wet the paste should be.

The hinge: a genuinely slow ovenThe hinge: a genuinely slow oven. The book calls only for a "slow oven" and gives no temperature or time; by the usual modern equivalents that is somewhere around 275–300F. The point is to dry the icing and set the paste without taking any color, so watch them rather than trust a clock — if the tops brown, the pistachio green and the white icing are both lost.
Weights, convertedHalf a pound of pounded almonds is 8 oz (about 2 cups almond flour), three-quarters of a pound of sugar is 12 oz (about 1 2/3 cups), and 10 oz of chopped pistachios is a generous 2 cups. The pistachios go into the icing, not the paste.
Egg whites are a variable"three or four" means adding them one at a time until the mass just holds together as a firm, non-sticky paste. Eggs of the period are generally thought to have run smaller than today's large ones, so begin with the three the recipe allows and add the fourth only if the paste will not come together; too much white and the paste spreads in the oven.
Pounded almondsAlmonds, usually blanched, reduced in a mortar. The recipe does not say whether any of the sugar goes in with them, but pounding (or pulsing) the nuts with a little of the sugar rather than alone keeps them from oiling and turning to butter.
Royal icing (No. 101)Egg white beaten with sifted sugar to a spreadable, not runny, consistency. It goes into the oven here, but only a slow one, so if raw white is a concern use pasteurized whites or meringue powder, which behaves much the same way.
Rolling and cuttingRoll the paste between sheets of parchment dusted with confectioner's sugar rather than flour, which dulls the surface. Spread the pistachio icing on the sheet of paste, let it firm for a few minutes, then cut with a long thin blade wiped between cuts.
Baking sheetThe buttered-and-floured sheet is period practice; parchment or a silicone mat is cleaner and less likely to color the bases.
YieldSticks 2 1/4 by 5/8 inch from this quantity of paste give several dozen petits fours, the exact count depending on how much goes to trimmings.

A Little History

Touron is the French form of Spanish turr\-and-sugar confection generally traced to the Levantine Mediterranean and long associated with Alicante and Jijona, where it is still a Christmas fixture. By the nineteenth century French pastry cooks had borrowed the word for a family of small baked almond-paste sweets — coated, tinted or studded with pistachio, hazelnut or candied fruit — rather than the slab nougat itself, and Ranhofer gives one here, preceded by pistachio lozenges and followed by quillets. The heavy hand with pistachios is characteristic of the period's petits fours. Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) out of some thirty years at Delmonico's in New York, and the petits fours chapter reflects a house that sent out trays of dozens of tiny pastries at a time.