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Macaroons
(Amaretti) I Granulated sugar, nine ounces.
Sweet almonds, three and a half ounces.
Bitter almonds, half of the above quantity.
Whites of egg, two.
Skin and dry the almonds, then chop them very fine. Mix the sugar and the whites of egg and stir for about half an hour, then add the almonds to form a rather hard paste. Of this make little balls, as large as a small walnut. If the paste is too soft add a little butter, if too hard add a little white of egg, this time beaten. Were it desired to give the macaroons a brownish color, mix with the paste a little burnt sugar.
As you form the little ball, that you will flatten to the thickness of one third of an inch, put them over wafers or on pieces of paper or in a baking tin greased with butter and sprinkled with half flour and half powdered sugar. Dispose them at a certain distance from one another as they will enlarge and swell, remaining empty inside.
Bake in an oven moderately hot.
II Powdered sugar, ten and a half ounces.
Sweet almonds, three ounces.
Bitter almonds, one ounce.
Two whites of egg.
Skin the almonds and dry them in the sun or on the fire, then chop and grind very fine with one white of egg poured in various times. When this is done, put half of the sugar, stirring and kneading with your hand. Then pour everything in a large bowl and, always mixing, add half of the other white of egg, then the other half of the sugar and finally the other half of the white.
In this way an homogenous mixture will be obtained of the right firmness. Shake into a kind of a stick and cut it in rounds all equal, one third of an inch thick. Take them up one by one with moistened fingers and make little balls as large as a walnut. Flatten them to the thickness of a third of an inch and for the rest proceed as said above, but dust with powdered sugar before putting in a hot oven.
With this dose about thirty macarons can be obtained. 198
Both versions of this recipe are built on bitter almonds, and that single ingredient puts the dish out of reach of a modern kitchen. The points below explain the problem rather than work around it.
- Bitter almonds are the whole issueBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed, chewed or wetted — exactly what grinding with egg white does. This is not a trace concern: the toxin is the reason the nut tastes as it does.
- The quantities are not smallVersion I calls for roughly 1¾ oz of bitter almonds, version II for a full ounce; the recipe gives a yield of about thirty little cakes for the second version. At around a gram a kernel that is something like thirty kernels in version II and forty or more in version I, in a batch a household might eat in an afternoon, and children are affected at far lower doses than adults.
- Baking is not a reliable fixHeat drives off some hydrogen cyanide and deactivates some of the enzyme, but a short bake in a domestic oven is not a controlled process and cannot be assumed to bring the load down to a safe level. Commercial bitter-almond products are heat- and water-treated under measurement; a home oven is not.
- You cannot buy them anywayRaw bitter almonds are prohibited from retail sale in the United States and restricted in many other countries. Anything sold loose as "bitter almond" in a shop today is almost always sweet almond flavoured with benzaldehyde, or apricot kernel — which carries the same amygdalin problem.
- Not the same as almond extractBottled almond extract, whether synthetic benzaldehyde or the distilled natural kind, has had the cyanogenic fraction removed or was never there. It is not evidence that the raw kernel is harmless.
- If you want amarettiUse a current recipe. Modern Italian amaretti are made with sweet almonds and a controlled bitter-almond flavouring, and they give the same result the author was after.
- On the oven, for reading purposes"Moderately hot" in books of this period is usually taken to mean somewhere around 350–375F, and a "hot oven" rather higher, perhaps 400F; these are conventions, not figures the text gives. Noted only so the instructions make sense, not as an instruction to follow.
Amaretti takes its name from amaro, bitter — the point of the biscuit was the sharp, perfumed note that bitter almonds gave, set against a great deal of sugar. Almond-and-egg-white confections of this kind run back through medieval and Renaissance Italian sugar work and are close cousins of the French macaron and the Spanish and Sicilian marzipans, all of them descended from the sugar-and-almond cookery that reached Europe through the Arab Mediterranean. That a cookbook of this period still specifies bitter almonds by weight suggests they were then an ordinary grocery item, sold alongside sweet almonds; restrictions on their retail sale came later. The instruction to bake on wafers — thin edible ostie, the same sheets used for communion hosts — follows older Italian practice, and some traditional makers still use them.