Macarons V.S Macaroons
While discussing various A-Levels with Miss Stone over open morning, the topic of food was brought forward. In A-Level English Lit, once a week, we have cake, a welcome sweet treat to get us through essay planning or the rather depressing context behind Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four. As we argued over the best subject, this was a strong reason to take English Lit (because who doesn’t like a bit of cake on a Friday or Saturday morning?!) but Tilly J swiftly informed us that they have food in both Politics and French – and in her French lessons, they usually have foods that originated in France.
Thus spurred the debate into whether Macarons or Macaroons were better – and, indeed, which was which?
A MACARON is the delightfully colourful, French sweet treat, comprising meringues and is made with ground almonds, egg whites and granulated sugar. To complicate matters further than the already similar names, there is more than one method of making them : an Italian method and a French method. Both seem to contain the same ingredients and I suppose it comes down to the preferred final result.
A MACAROON, on the other hand, tends to be made using coconut, or almond, and is slightly more cake-like. Macaroons tend to be thought of as being more British…but wait. It isn’t quite so simple…
Technically – they are simply variations of the same thing. Both Macarons and Macaroons use mainly the same ingredients, but in different ways. Their country of origin is neither England, nor France, but indeed, Italy.
Macaron and Macaroon come from a very similarly sounding Italian word – which is, believe it or not, Macaroni. Like the pasta (in Italian – Maccheroni). No one actually knows for sure where the word comes from, but there are theories. The Oxford English Dictionary says that the first recorded use of the word in from around the sixteenth century, used to describe a ‘paste, boiled in water and put into a dish of butter, spice and cheese grated upon them’ – a little like gnocchi. And what do these have in common? They are all made using pastes.
What I’m trying to get at here is that – all of these are connected because they are made using a paste. And – good news for some – both Macarons and Macaroons are famously gluten free, so if you have an allergy, you would be safe to eat these!
There is a lot more detail online about the derivation of these words, and how the sweet treat has taken on various different forms, which, if you are interested in Latin, Greek – or the topic of language and its evolution as a whole, is quite an extensive, yet thought provoking idea.
Essentially, what we established was that English Literature is the best A Level. Would definitely recommend 🙂
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