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Cocoanut Macaroons
One-half pound coffee A sugar, two and one-half whites of eggs, one-half pound cocoanut. Beat half an hour. Bake on buttered tins in a slow oven.
A four-line formula that assumes you know what the batter should look like. Two things need translating: the sugar, and the half-hour of beating.
- Coffee A sugarA 19th-century trade grade of refined white sugar, slightly coarser than today's granulated and sold for sweetening coffee. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute; half a pound is about 1 1/8 cups.
- CocoanutDesiccated (dried, unsweetened) shredded coconut, which by the late 19th century was sold ready-prepared by grocers; earlier and alongside it, cooks grated the meat from a whole nut. Half a pound is roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups loosely packed. Modern sweetened flaked coconut will make the macaroons cloying against this much sugar.
- Two and one-half whitesEggs of the period were less uniform and often smaller than a modern large egg; figure roughly 70 to 75 g of white, which is two large whites plus a spoonful or two of a third. Add the odd half-white last, only if the mixture will not hold together.
- Beat half an hourHand-beating with a whisk or spoon for that long dissolves the sugar into the whites and builds a thick, glossy meringue. With a stand mixer, whip whites and sugar to stiff, satiny peaks -- 8 to 10 minutes -- then fold in the coconut by hand rather than beating it in.
- A slow ovenAbout 275 to 300F. Coconut and sugar both scorch quickly; the point of the low heat is to dry the macaroons through while keeping them pale, so expect 20 to 30 minutes.
- Buttered tinsParchment is more reliable, since a sugar-heavy meringue welds itself to metal as it cools. If you butter the sheet, lift the macaroons off while still warm.
- Shaping and yieldDrop in rounded teaspoonfuls, spaced an inch apart -- they spread little. The quantity makes several dozen small macaroons.
- DonenessThey should be firm and faintly gold at the edges, still slightly soft in the centre; they set as they cool. Store airtight, and they keep a few days without going hard.
The macaroon began as an almond-and-egg-white confection -- the name comes through French macaron from Italian maccherone, though what the Italian word originally described is not settled -- and it was long valued as a way of using leftover whites in a household that had spent the yolks elsewhere. Coconut versions belong to the later 19th century, when mechanised shredding and drying made imported coconut cheap and shelf-stable in American groceries; cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s carry a great many coconut cakes, pies, and macaroons, though earlier books already used freshly grated coconut. These were tea-table and dessert-tray sweets, small, white, and made in quantity, the kind of thing turned out by the tinful for company rather than served as a family pudding. That they contain no flour also made them a standing Passover sweet, a use that predates the coconut form.