Small crunchy clouds

PalmaWhen I went to visit her, I would often find her curled up on the sofa doing lace work. She had extraordinary skill with crochet, despite wearing glasses with thick, bottle-bottom lenses that made her eyes look small, so small. Often, she would rub them with Lourdes water, a little bottle shaped like the Virgin Mary containing a miraculous liquid that she was sure would restore her sight. In the pantry, she kept all kinds of sweets, chocolate bars, biscuits, and, above all, small meringue and almond balls that she cooked over a slow fire with love and patience. Those fragile sweets were like clouds that melted in the mouth, a mirage that shattered amidst the crunch-crunch of the crispy nuts.

Almond boxes are one of the sweets from our confectionery most present in our recipe books. Their preparation starts from egg whites beaten to stiff peaks, to which sugar and almonds, often toasted or chopped, are incorporated (many times pine nuts are also used, alone or in combination with the almond), which are flavored with cinnamon, lemon, and occasionally orange or vanilla. The mixture is distributed into small paper boxes and baked at a moderate temperature until it acquires a light and brittle texture. These preparations remind us of a cuisine that sought to make use of food down to the last morsel, when the yolks were used in other preparations and the leftover whites were reserved for new sweets, such as meringue, and other derivatives of this type of cream like the boxes and the soplillos.

Nuts and sugar

The almond holds a privileged place in our pastry making. Amargos, panellets, and pa moixó are some of the preparations that share with capsetes the combination of dried fruit and sugar, even though the techniques and textures are different. Amargos and panellets usually present a more compact consistency, while capsetes preserve a light structure, where the sweet foam envelops the almond fragments and creates a contrast between the fragility of the meringue and the crunchiness of the dried fruit.

In Menorca, we find a preparation that invites comparison: the sweet macaroni documented in the Caules Recipe Book (18th century) and later collected by Pedro Ballester in De re Cibaria in 1923. According to Ballester, these are the oldest sweets in Menorcan confectionery and would bear a certain resemblance to the English macaroon biscuit, nut cookies that, in their simplest formulas, were prepared with almond, sugar, and egg white. The British presence in Menorca during the 18th century favored the arrival of English culinary customs and tastes, so it is suggestive to propose a possible relationship between both preparations. However, the similarity of the ingredients does not allow for establishing a direct filiation, since the combinations of almond, sugar, and egg white are common to various European and Mediterranean confectionery traditions.

Almond boxes are, in short, small expressions of a cuisine of ingenuity and resourcefulness, capable of turning humble ingredients into delicate and suggestive sweets.