If You Love ‘The Gilded Age,’ Bring This Cookie to Your Swap
Bonus: This historic treat only has 3 ingredients.
Editor’s Note: HBO, Max and Food Network are sister brands of parent company Warner Bros. Discovery.
Entertaining played an outsize role in Gilded Age high society, with occasions ranging from picnics to afternoon teas, multi-course dinner parties to holiday celebrations. These events featured extravagant spreads, including a variety of confections such as cookies. As this season of HBO Original series The Gilded Age comes to a close (the final episode premieres on Sunday, December 17), it's the perfect opportunity to give your holiday season a 19th-century vibe. We've got the perfect cookie for you to enjoy as you stream the entire season on Max.
During the Gilded Age, different occasions called for different types of cookies. Becky Libourel Diamond, author of The Gilded Age Cookbook: Recipes and Stories from America's Golden Era, notes that sturdier, more portable cookies such as molasses, ginger and peanut cookies were served at picnics, while extravagant multi-course dinner parties featured daintier and "fancier" varieties such as macaroons, wafer cookies and meringue cookies. For an elegant yet easy cookie recipe that’s guaranteed to win your holiday cookie swap, try making Libourel Diamond’s Chocolate Macaroons, which is featured in The Gilded Age Cookbook.
Many macaroon recipes of the time called for crushed almonds, but Libourel Diamond chose to adapt a chocolate macaroon cookie recipe from a Pierre Blot recipe featured in Cocoa and Chocolate: A Short History of Their Production and Use, a promotional pamphlet published by the Baker’s Chocolate company in 1886. "Chocolate was an important Gilded Age innovation as this is the era when chocolate confections really started appearing in cookbooks. Earlier in the century a Dutchman by the name of van Houten patented a way to simplify cacao processing by pressing out most of the fat and alkalizing the dry cocoa that remained," Libourel Diamond says. "This revolutionized the manufacturing of chocolate, allowing it to assume solid, liquid, and powdered form, paving the way for all kinds of chocolate dessert possibilities."
This Chocolate Macaroon recipe follows Blot’s ingredient list and technique, which calls for making a paste out of baking chocolate, confectioner’s sugar and egg whites — but bumps up the chocolate to four ounces to give the macaroons a deeper chocolate flavor. The result is a cookie that is easy to make and assemble, looks impressive and boasts an appealing crisp-chewy texture. For a wow-factor pairing that contrasts temperatures and textures, try serving the cookies warm with a scoop of cool, creamy vanilla ice cream.
Happy glitzy, gilded, delicious holiday!
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