Home › Dainty Dishes › Hickroons
Hickroons
This is a very delicious dainty, similar to macaroons. Take one pound of powdered sugar, one pound of chopped hickory nuts, the whites of five unbeaten eggs, half a cupful of flour, two small teaspoonfuls of baking powder. Beat all together. Drop on buttered paper on tins, bake or dry in the oven.
A macaroon in the American idiom: no almond paste, no whipped meringue, just nuts bound with sugar and raw white. Two details in the wording carry most of the outcome.
- "Unbeaten" is the instruction that matters"Unbeaten" is the instruction to note -- The whites go in slack rather than whipped, so they act mainly as a binder; whipping them first would push the mixture toward a meringue and a lighter, more fragile cookie. Here it stays dense and chewy.
- Powdered sugar, 1900Powdered sugar -- In this period "powdered" usually meant granulated sugar ground fine, closer to today's superfine than to confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Either works here, but confectioners' sugar gives a softer, more fragile cookie.
- Hickory nutsShagbark hickory is still gathered in the eastern and midwestern US but is almost never sold shelled. Pecans are the same genus and the standard stand-in; substitute by weight, one pound, chopped fairly fine rather than in large pieces.
- Buttered paper on tinsParchment on a sheet pan, no butter needed. The paper would have been plain unglazed kitchen paper, and the butter was there to keep the sugar from welding it to the cookie.
- "Bake or dry in the oven"The wording points to a low oven, though the recipe gives neither temperature nor time. Something in the region of 300F, baked until the tops look dull and dry rather than browned, follows the sense of it; a hotter oven will caramelize the sugar before the interior sets.
- The batter is stiff and stickyOne pound of nuts to five whites gives a heavy paste, not a pourable batter. Drop it with two teaspoons or a small scoop, in mounds no bigger than a walnut, and expect very little spread.
- Baking powderTwo small teaspoonfuls in this quantity is a modest amount and will only lighten the crumb slightly. Period powders were not necessarily comparable in strength to modern ones, so measure level.
- Yield and keepingRoughly four dozen small cookies. Let them cool completely on the paper before lifting, or they tear; they keep about a week in a tin and stale less quickly than a true meringue.
The name is a portmanteau of hickory and macaroon, and it tells you what the cook was doing: taking a European almond confection and rebuilding it around a nut that grew wild in the American woods. Shagbark and shellbark hickories were a common autumn gathering crop across the eastern states, laborious to crack, which meant a cupful of picked-out kernels represented real work and was spent on something worth the effort. Recipes of this shape, nuts and sugar bound with unbeaten white, run through nineteenth-century American household books under a variety of names, and they persisted partly because they need no butter, no creaming and no careful oven; a cooling brick oven or the residual heat after a bake would presumably have dried them well enough.