Spiced chocolate macaroons and la belle chocolatière

I fear I am succumbing to more lucky dips than I should. I am getting lazy - and perhaps my punishment is the fact that what I picked today is sort of the same as a previous blog on macarons and macaroons. A somewhat weird coincidence don't you think, considering how they are not my kind of thing at all? And I almost cheated and put the book back. But then I reprimanded myself and dipped into it and found a couple of interesting things to say. Not least of which is that this recipe produces something looking a bit like the ones above I think - which is different again from those I talked about in my previous blog.

The book first of all. It's called The Chocolate Book by somebody called Helge Rubinstein. I have no idea why I bought this book - maybe I was trying to please David who is a bit of a chocoholic. And why have I kept it too? I threw out a whole lot of cookery books a few years ago, but for some reason decided to keep this one. It was published in 1982 in my paperback version, so I guess these might have been the dinner party years. Maybe I was looking for inspiration for dessert. I honestly don't remember ever cooking anything from it either, and the author is rather unknown - although the introduction claims that she has written other successful books. I don't have any of them and I do not think she is a well-known cook. So I did a search in Google images and here she is (below). It would seem that The Chocolate Book was her most well-known work, but she seems to have had a parallel career as a marriage counsellor - now how weird is that? Her father was Jewish and the family escaped from Nuremberg just before the war. The family remained in England even after the war.

The book itself is illustrated, not with pictures of the dishes therein but with various historical pictures and documents that have something to do with the history of chocolate - for she gives a little bit of this along the way. The recipe I opened the book at Spiced chocolate macaroons is illustrated with a picture of Anna Baltauf, also known as La Belle Chocolatière. Her story is completely irrelevant to the recipe and to the book, but it's quite a nice story so I give it here.

LA BELLE CHOCOLATIERE

Apparently in America there is a firm called Baker's who presumably made or make chocolate, (drinking chocolate I think) and who used this portrait of Anna Baltauf as their trade mark. Anna Baltauf was Austrian and worked in a Viennese chocolate house, where she met her husband - a prince no less - Prince Dietrichstein. He liked the new drink and came to love the girl who served it. As a wedding gift he had her painted by Jean-Etienne Liotard but insisted that she pose in the chocolate server's dress she wore when she met him. Kinky? This is the portrait that Baker's used.

So she's not really a chocolatière at all - I think a chocolatière is someone who makes chocolates, not a waitress, which is what she really seems to have been. How the Americans came to use her portrait I have no idea. The same artist though also painted a more formal portrait which illustrates the page with our recipe on it. In this one it looks as if somebody else has served her with the drink.

One last thing before I get on to the recipe itself. Opposite the contents page is a copy of what is said to be the first ever engraving of cocoa, which, of course, was one of those things brought from South America by the conquistadores. Mind you I vaguely remember learning at school that most of the world's cocoa came from Africa - from what was then the Gold Coast or maybe New Guinea if my memory serves me right. The larger cocoa tree at right is shading and protecting the smaller one.

From the South Americans comes the flavouring of cinnamon which gives this recipe the title of 'spiced'. Ms. Rubinstein maintains that "a little cinnamon deepens the flavour in a remarkable way" and in Mexico chocolate often comes flavoured with cinnamon as a matter of course. There are cloves in the recipe too.

She also refers to the recipe on the previous page of her book, saying that these spiced macaroons are very light and more fragile than the previous recipe. So I had a quick look at that one too and found that there were two methods producing differing results, and also the comment that if you made them with hazelnuts rather than almonds then they had a particularly rich flavour. "Method 1 makes dark, slightly moist macaroons, while the macaroons made by method 2 have a light and crisp outside, and are dark and fudge in the centre.". The difference seems to be that in method 1 the chocolate is melted and in method two it is grated and added with the chopped nuts.

Finally the recipe that started all of this rambling.

SPICED CHOCOLATE MACAROONS

"half-way between a meringue and a macaroon, and an excellent accompaniment to ices, mousses or other desserts."

50g plain or bitter chocolate

3 egg whites

175g caster sugar

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Pinch ground cloves

75g ground almonds

Rice paper (optional) - you don't see much of that anymore do you?

Heat the oven to 180ºC.

Melt the chocolate and leave to cool.

Whisk the egg whites until they begin to stand in peaks, then slowly beat in the sugar until you have a dense, shiny meringue mixture.

Blend the spices into the ground almonds, sift these over the meringue and fold in carefully. Blend in the cooled melted chocolate.

Line baking sheets with rice paper, or, if this unobtainable, with lightly buttered foil, or use non-stick baking sheets. (I think nowadays we would use baking paper - which obviously did not exist back in the 80s. Interesting.)

Put dollops of the mixture on the baking sheets with a dessertspoon, leaving plenty of space between each as they will spread a good deal.

Bake in the centre of the oven for 40-50 minutes. The macaroons should have a pale crusty top, but still be a little moist in the centre.

Leave to cool a little, then remove from the baking trays and cut or break away excess rice paper, or peel off the foil.

Leave on wire baking trays to cool and harden.

Sounds fraught with possibilities for things going wrong to me. But then I am absolutely hopeless with meringue kind of things.