Macarons d’Amiens, Hell, mice, and all the souls in Purgatory
Posted by Teresa at 03:53 PM * 0 comments

Macarons d’Amiens are stout, succulent little golden-brown hockey pucks of concentrated almond goodness. They share a name but not much else with the currently fashionable sandwich-cookie-style Macarons de Paris. The same is also true of the other traditional macarons à l’ancienne, as seen in Reims, Lyons, Nancy, Boullay, Cormery, Lusignan, Fontevraud, Montmorillion, Joyeuse, Maroc-that-was, Niort, Vercors, Sault, Melun (Réau), Le Dorat, Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat, St. Jean de Luz, Saint-Émilion, Provence, and Marseille. (French cooking is nothing if not regional.) They all maintain a decent adherence to the basic almond/sugar/egg white formulation. It’s the macarons de Paris that are the mutant fungus.

A number of these regional variant douceurs de terroir are credited to Catherine de Medici, or rather the cooks she brought with her, when she left Italy for France in 1533. I cherish certain doubts about this. For one thing, the macarons whose legends mention her span the range of macaron styles — flat to fluffy, crisp to moist. first written reference to sugar in Europe 1099 Persians, the first culture to really take to sugar in a big way, were making sweet little baked yummies as of the 7th C. once made and cooked the marchpane seems almost indestructible. Catherine de Medici’s move to France really is a watershed in European cooking. Her Italian cooks were far more sophisticated than the French. She’s also credited with bringing the first fruit ices to general attention, and you know those are originally from the Middle East. Italy, marzipan, circa 1300, probably through contact with Arabic culture. Sugar goes from being a medicine to a yummy luxury around 1200. First known instance? Sugar-coated almonds. Sugar industry underway, sugar in general use, 15th C. Whenever you hear that something was invented first in Venice, consider the possibility that it came in from the Mediterranean trade. Turks were certainly big on nut-and-sugar sweetmeats, as were the Byzantines before them. Marzipan! Also known as marchpane, this almond paste was extremely popular because it could be molded and baked and made into shapes. Our medieval ancestors used to make marzipan grapes, or try to make real grapes look like marzipan ones by dipping them in marzipan! Marzipan figures would decorate all manner of dishes. Special times might see marzipan replicas of the building that the feast was held in, or of the lord and lady of the castle. Several of these regional variants are locally credited to Catherine de Medici, who supposedly brought the recipe with her from Italy to France in 1533. Perhaps she brought a book of them.

Nomenclature: for a long time macaron was just the French equivalent of macaroon, and it still would be if coconut macaroons hadn’t been invented. Up to that point, all macarons and macaroons had been made of ground almonds, sugar, egg white, and whatever else your local variant entailed. A macaro[o]n was by default an almond macaro[o]n, so when coconut macaroons came along they were the non-default version that needed a modifying adjective. But shredded coconut is cheap and commonly available, coconut macaroons are easy to make and durable to store, and they’re a godsend at Passover; so with one thing and another, the default U.S. macaroon became coconut. Proof: commercially available “almond macaroons” that are coconut macaroons with a little almond flavoring.

Macarons de Paris have gotten very fashionable of late. Almost every food writer who tries to explain them winds up claiming that macaroons are from the United States and are made of coconut, whereas macarons are French and are primarily made of almond. (Except for Anges de Sucre, which in the illustration following A luscious confection and his ugly little cousin captions a photo of a macaron, “I was made from angels’ tears (and almond meal) by unicorn foals,” and a photo of a coconut macaroon, “I was made from desiccated coconut by your grandmother.”) http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NILV6meNJco/UCJnipp9-SI/AAAAAAAAB7M/j2LOHD_KkMo/s1600/macaron+vs+macaroon+DBG.jpg http://lovelylittledetails.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/macaroon-vs-macaron.jpg http://joyeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/macarons-vsmacaroons1.jpg http://pliadesigns.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/laduree.jpg http://www.cupcakeproject.com/2011/10/macaron-recipe-pumpkin-pie-spice.html http://confessionsofafoodnazi.blogspot.com/2011/07/better-late-than-never-macarons-are-not.html http://www.maydae.com/travel/i-want-some-macarons-not-macaroons/ http://www.dearbabyg.com/2012/08/what-is-the-difference-between-macarons-and-macaroons.html http://www.thekitchn.com/whats-the-difference-macaroons-63982 http://theflirtyguide.blogspot.com/2011/04/macaroon-macaron-two-distinctly.html Just to confuse things, the French name for a coconut macaroon is a Congolais. http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congolais_(p%C3%A2tisserie) They’re a local specialty in Picardy, where the story goes that they were introduced by Catherine de Medici in the 16th Century. It might be true. The history of the macaron and related confections is an impressive tangle of variant pastries and approximate dates. So far, I’m sure of one thing: the Larousse Gastronomique is wrong. The macaron can’t have been invented in 1791 in a convent near Cormery, because recognizable specimens were loose on the hoof in Italy, France, and possibly Spain a couple of centuries earlier.

The most prominent authority and source for Macarons d’Amiens is the boutique Jean Trogneux (“Chocolatiers depuis cinq générations”) in Amiens. Their primacy does not appear to be recognized by Alain Langlet of the Boulangerie-Pâtisserie Langlet in Corbie, a village about 20 km east along the Somme, where the Langlets have been passing along the recipe for a couple of hundred years. There’s a limit to how much they can argue about it, though, because the Langlets and Jean Trogneux use almost word-for-word the same recipe, which they both have posted on their websites. They have to be working off a single-source traditional version.

The Boulangerie-Pâtisserie Langlet also makes the fractionally less traditional Pavé de Corbie (ou Pavé Picard), which has been officially recognized as the Macaron d’Amiens’ younger cousin. It answers the second question I asked myself after making the acquaintance of macarons: “I wonder how these things would taste if you made them out of hazelnuts?” (That’s the next project.)

Macarons d’Amiens

250 g. ground or powdered almonds
200 g. sugar or powdered sugar
1 T. honey
1-2 egg whites and one egg yolk
1 T. apple, apricot, or quince jelly, or apricot jam
a few drops of vanilla
1 tsp. bitter almond extract

Mix almonds, sugar, honey, and vanilla. In a mortar (if you have a mortar), gradually incorporate the egg whites until the mixture reaches the consistency of almond paste. This may not use up all the egg whites. Add the jelly and almond extract. Form into a roll 4 cm. in diameter, wrap in plastic film, and let sit in the refrigerator for 6-8 hours.

Preheat oven to 350 F., or possibly a bit less. Cut the roll in slices 2 cm. thick, brush the tops with egg yolk, and place them on a baking sheet covered with parchment. Bake for 20 minutes until golden but not browned — this is a moist almond mixture tenderly held together by congealed egg. If they start to brown too quickly, take them out, turn off the oven, then put them back in until the centers are set.

When they’re completely cool, wrap each macaron in aluminum foil or fancy foiled wrappers, and store in an airtight container. Makes 20 very rich macarons, which sources reckon should serve five or six — or three people, I can testify, if those three are stuck for hours in traffic, trying to get back to Amsterdam when every freeway within 75 km of Utrecht has slowed to a crawl.”>*

It was Sunday when we were in Amiens and the shop was closed, so we had to buy our macarons from the Office de Tourisme over by the cathedral. I was sorry to miss it. Their front window was filled with all kinds of interesting regional specialties, not least among them little chocolate-praline mice, and decapitated heads of Saint Quentin (with his hat still on) in light and dark chocolate. Saint Quentin I can understand; he was a local boy. But mice fall under the patronage of St. Gertrude of Nivelles — that’s Nivelles in Belgium, 200 km distant — and her main shrine was in Cologne, where gold and silver mice were still being given as offerings as late as 1822 …

AHA!

No, I haven’t found out why Jean Trogneux sells chocolate mice. I just found the answer to a much more perplexing question: why hell is full of mice. plaque http://www.creatormundi.com/images/p8m_b.jpg painting http://www.greenwichworkshop.com/saintsandangels/23.htm