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Petits Croissants Au Pistachios
Place in a mortar four ounces peeled almonds and thoroughly pound them to a paste, adding one by one the whites of three eggs, continually pounding while adding them. Place paste in a bowl with one ounce sugar, two ounces flour, six drops vanilla essence, one teaspoon rum, and sharply stir with wooden spoon until well amalgamated. Take up a teaspoon of the paste and roll it out on corner of a lightly sugared table to the thickness of a thick pencil, giving it a half-moon-like shape. Proceed the same with rest of paste, then place them on a baking sheet.
Scald an ounce of pistachios in boiling water for a minute, drain, peel and divide them in halves, then arrange them on top of cakes one beside another lengthwise. With a hair pastry brush lightly egg them on the surface, set in a brisk oven for ten minutes, remove, let cool off and serve.
An almond-paste petit four, closer to a macaroon than to a laminated croissant — the name refers only to the crescent shape. The paste is stiff, barely sweet, and it scorches quickly, so the oven and the timer matter more than anything else here.
- "Brisk oven"Brisk is generally taken to mean a hot oven, somewhere in the region of 400-425F. The recipe allows ten minutes; small almond cakes colour fast at that heat, so watch them rather than trusting the clock.
- Weights, not volumeFour ounces almonds is about 3/4 cup whole nuts; one ounce sugar is about 2 tablespoons; two ounces flour is a little under 1/2 cup. Weigh them — the ratio of nut to flour is what holds the crescents together.
- Peeled almondsThis means blanched: pour boiling water over them, stand a minute, and slip the skins off. Dry them well before pounding or the paste turns soupy.
- The mortar, and its substituteA food processor does the same job in a minute. Pulse the almonds nearly to a paste first, then add the whites one at a time with the machine running, exactly as the original directs — added all at once they will not emulsify into the nuts.
- Egg sizes have grownEgg sizes -- three whites may have amounted to somewhat less liquid than three from modern large eggs, though this is hard to pin down. Add the third white only if the paste is still crumbly; you want something that will roll and hold a shape, not spread.
- Vanilla essenceSix drops is a very small amount, on the order of 1/8 teaspoon or less of modern extract, not a measured quarter-spoon. The rum is there for aroma, not sweetness, and dark rum suits the almond better than white.
- Rolling on a sugared tableAny clean counter dusted lightly with granulated sugar works; the sugar keeps the sticky paste moving and leaves a faint crust. Roll to pencil thickness, then bend into a crescent — thicker ropes stay raw in the middle at this oven temperature.
- PistachiosA minute in boiling water loosens the skins and revives the green. Press the halves in firmly before the egg wash or they fall off as the cookies expand.
- Yield and keepingAt a teaspoon of paste per crescent this quantity will give several dozen small cakes. They soften within a day or so; store airtight.
The name is a shape, not a dough — croissant simply means crescent, and almond-paste crescents of this kind belong to the family of petits fours secs that a professional pastry kitchen turned out by the tray to fill out a dessert service. They are close cousins of the German Mandelhörnchen and of the Italian almond pastes made with nothing but ground nuts, egg white and a whisper of flour, all of which descend from the medieval European trade in almonds and sugar through the Mediterranean. The detail that dates this version is the equipment: a mortar and a hair pastry brush, and a lightly sugared table used as the work surface for rolling. A book like this one assumed a reader with both the tools and the patience to pound four ounces of nuts by hand.