The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu by Dan Jurafsky

Author:Dan Jurafsky [Jurafsky, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-09-14T20:00:00+00:00

To Make Mackroons

Take a pound & halfe of almonds, blanch & beat them very small in a stone morter with rosewater. put to them a pound of sugar, & ye whites of 4 eggs, & beat ym together. & put in 2 grayns of muske ground with a spoonfull or 2 of rose water. beat ym together till yr oven is as hot as for manchet, then put them on wafers & set them in on A plat. after a while, take them out. [yn when] yr oven is cool, set [ym in] againe & dry ym

This recipe tells us that in the first half of the seventeenth century, the macaroon still had the rosewater and musk of its medieval Arab antecedent, lauznaj. We also see that macaroons were set on a wafer after baking, a historical remnant of the pastry shell of the earlier recipes.

Even as this recipe was being written, however, modern French cuisine began to evolve out of its medieval antecedents, as cooks replaced imported medieval spices like musk with local herbs. The chef whose work is often considered the turning point in this transition was François Pierre de La Varenne, and the first completely modern recipe for macaroons comes from the 1652 edition of his cookbook, The French Cook, in which he eliminates orange water and rosewater from the earlier instantiations. He also eliminated the pastry shell; the only remnant of the former wafer is a piece of paper that the macaron sits on:

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