No. 6

To Pound, Crush, and Color Almonds

Pour Piler Broyer et Colorer les Amandes

To Pound.—Almonds are pounded in a mortar or crushed in a machine; in the mortar by wetting a few at the time with either eggs or liquids, then stirring in some sugar. In a machine, by mixing the almonds and sugar together and pouring it into the funnel of the machine; the first time they should be barely crushed, pass through four times, tightening the cylinders slightly for each turn, and the last time the almonds should be reduced to a paste.

To Color Almonds.—Use chopped or shredded almonds for coloring. For pink, dilute a little carmine in some thirty degree syrup with a little kirsch; rub the almonds in this and dry them. For violet, use red, blue and maraschino; for orange, yellow, red and curacao; for lemon color, yellow and noyau; and for green, spinach and orange flower water.

← No. 5 To Peel Almonds, Pistachios or Filberts Elementary Methods No. 7 To Blanch Rice →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer is describing two separate operations: reducing almonds to a paste for marzipan and pastry fillings, and tinting chopped or shredded almonds for decorating. Both translate cleanly to a modern kitchen once the vocabulary and the sugar syrup are pinned down.

Sugar is not optionalThe sugar mixed with the almonds is what keeps them from turning into oily butter under pressure. Working almonds dry in a food processor releases their oil and the mass seizes; adding sugar (or the eggs and liquids Ranhofer specifies for mortar work) absorbs it and holds the paste together.
The machineThe "machine" is an almond mill with adjustable rollers, the same principle as a chocolate melangeur. A food processor is the modern equivalent, and the four-pass instruction still applies in spirit: pulse to a coarse meal, rest, then work in stages rather than running it continuously until it heats and greases.
Thirty degree syrupDegrees Baumé, measured with a hydrometer, not degrees of temperature. Thirty degrees is a heavy syrup, in the region of equal weights of sugar and water brought to a boil and cooled. It is there to carry the color and make it cling.
CarmineCochineal extract, still sold as carmine or as natural red 4. A drop or two of modern food coloring does the same work; the historic point is that the color goes in as a liquid the almonds can be rubbed in, not as a powder.
Green from spinachThe green is spinach chlorophyll, made by pounding raw spinach, pressing out the juice and warming it gently until the green coagulates and can be skimmed off. It is a soft, slightly grey green, nothing like modern green dye, and it fades.
The liqueursKirsch (cherry), maraschino (marasca cherry), curacao (bitter orange) and noyau are the flavourings paired with each colour, though the pairings are not consistently a match of flavour to colour. Noyau is a kernel-flavored liqueur that is hard to find; almond extract or amaretto gives a similar aromatic register.
DryingSpread the rubbed almonds in a single layer and dry them in the lowest oven or at room temperature until they no longer feel tacky. Damp colored almonds bleed into whatever they garnish and go soft within hours.
YieldThe original gives none, as it is a component method. As a rule, 1 lb of blanched almonds worked with 1 lb of sugar gives about 2 lb of paste, enough to cover a large cake.

A Little History

This is entry No. 6 in the "Elementary Methods" chapter of Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the compendium of his thirty-odd years as chef of Delmonico's in New York. The chapter exists because Ranhofer was writing for a professional brigade: rather than repeat almond paste in every marzipan, nougat and petit four, he numbered the operation once and cross-referenced it. Almond mills with adjustable rollers appear to have been common enough in a nineteenth-century pastry department, and the practice of coloring shredded almonds belongs to the era's taste for elaborately dressed pièces montées and set pieces, where a garnish was expected to be pink, violet or green as much as edible. The use of spinach juice for green and cochineal for red reflects a period when the confectioner made colors in-house, and also a period of real anxiety about the mineral pigments—copper and lead compounds among them—that less scrupulous trades were known to use in sweets.