No. 3399

Rocks with Orangeade

Rochers a l'Orangeade

Incorporate some icing sugar with three egg-whites to have a rather light icing; add to it four ounces of vanilla sugar (No. 3165) and half a pound of shredded almonds slightly roasted in the oven and a quarter of a pound of thinly sliced candied orange peel. Roll out some sweet paste (No. 136) to an eighth of an inch in thickness, divide it into small inch and a half diameter rounds and range these on a buttered baking sheet; on each one lay a ball of the above preparation an inch and a quarter in diameter and cook in a slack oven.

← No. 3398 Pignon Rocks with White and Pink Almonds Fancy Cakes — Petits Fours No. 3400 Cherry Sticks →

For the Modern Kitchen

A meringue-and-almond "rock" baked on a disc of sweet pastry, from a book that assumes you have a pastry department at your disposal. Two of its ingredients are cross-references, and the oven instruction is the part that decides whether this works.

Slack oven means 275-300FSlack oven -- period usage for a cool oven, on the order of 275-300F. These are dried more than baked. At 350F the meringue browns and cracks before the interior sets; hold it low and bake until the rocks are firm and barely coloured and the pastry base is dry.
The icing quantity is genuinely openRanhofer says only "some icing sugar... to have a rather light icing." How much three whites take depends on how stiff you want it; add sifted confectioners' sugar gradually and stop at a soft peak rather than dumping it in, since the vanilla sugar adds another 4 oz of dry weight.
Vanilla sugar (No. 3165)Sugar scented with vanilla bean, made up separately in the book. A commercial vanilla sugar works, or grind a split bean with 4 oz sugar and sieve out the fibres.
Sweet paste (No. 136)A pâte sucrée: flour, butter, sugar, egg. Any short sweet pastry does. Roll it 1/8 inch, cut 1 1/2 inch rounds, and chill them on the sheet before topping so they do not slump.
Shredded almondsNot ground and not flaked-thin; a coarse shred, near modern slivered almonds, is the usual reading. Toast them until just fragrant and let them cool completely, or they will slacken the meringue.
Base and ballA 1 1/4 inch ball on a 1 1/2 inch round leaves almost no margin. Mound the mixture with two spoons rather than rolling it, and keep it just inside the pastry edge so it does not spread onto the sheet.
Sheet preparationButtered alone is a nuisance with sugar-heavy mixtures; parchment is the practical substitute and does not change the result.
Yield and keepingThe recipe states neither. They are meant to be served dry, as part of an assortment alongside Nos. 3398 and 3400.

A Little History

Rocher is French for rock, and the name describes the look: a rough, craggy mound of nut and meringue, deliberately unpolished in a genre otherwise devoted to smooth glazes. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, gathered this and its neighbours into the petits fours chapter of The Epicurean (1894), a book written less as a domestic manual than as a working record of a large professional kitchen — hence the numbered cross-references to a sweet paste and a vanilla sugar prepared elsewhere in the house. Candied orange peel was a staple of nineteenth-century confectionery, and its slight bitterness is what keeps a mixture this sweet from cloying. Rochers of this sort are generally traced to the same family of almond-meringue confections that produced macarons and the later chocolate-coated rocher; the shape, rather than any fixed formula, is what the name guarantees.