Welcome to the Food, Glorious Food blog series. This new, limited series is a companion blog series to the Museum’s temporary exhibition of the same name, now on display in the Museum’s lobby and Burgoyne Room through autumn 2025.

Throughout the series, Curator Kathleen Powell and Public Programmer Abbey Stansfield (both the expert bakers here at the Museum), will be exploring Victorian-era recipes and local food history to help us all appreciate the importance of food and its history in our daily lives.

Please enjoy Part 1: Almond Macaroons by Public Programmer Abbey Standsfield

Bon Appetit!

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Almond Macaroons
Author: Mrs. Susan Crowen
From: Every Lady’s Book

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“Throw scalding water on half a pound of almonds; take the skins off and throw them into cold water until all are done; then take them out and pound them (adding a tablespoonful of essence of lemon) to a smooth paste. Add to them an equal weight of fine powdered white sugar and the white of two eggs; work the paste well together with the back of a spoon. Then dip your hands in water and roll the preparation in balls the size and shape of a nutmeg, and lay them on a sheet of paper, the distance of at least an inch apart; when all are done dip your hands in water and pass them gently over the macaroons. This will make their surface smooth and shining. Put them in a cool oven and close it; in three quarters of an hour, they are done. 

If this receipt is strictly followed, there can be no failure, and the macaroons will be found equal to any made by professed confectioners.” 

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Susan Crowen and Every Lady’s Book

St. Catharines of the 1840s was experiencing what would be known as the golden age of sail. In the stages of building the Second Welland Canal the settlement had grown from the pre-canal farm community to a booming industrial centre. The early canal routes provided early residents of St. Catharines access to luxury goods that we wouldn’t normally associate with settlements in early Upper Canada. 

Susan Crowen was born in 1821 in Rensselaer County, New York. She and her family moved to New York City as a young child and by the 1840s she was married to Thomas Crowen a New York based publisher and book seller. In this era local printers would acquire the publishing rights and print the book locally. Records indicate that locally it was printed in Niagara-On-The-Lake and would have been available in the surrounding region. 

Every Lady’s Book contains traditional Victorian era recipes that intended to demonstrate a person’s wealth by means of what was on your table. In some instances, adulterants that we know to be hazardous today were added to get results without having to pay for premium ingredients or hire a professional. The ingredients for Mrs. Crowen’s Macaroon recipe, however, read the same as modern day ingredients for French Macarons.  

Almond Macaroons or what we would know as macarons today have been around since the thirteenth century. Originally from Italy, the recipe came to the French Court in 1533 when Catharine di Medici married King Henri II and brought her cook as part of her household. How exactly did a cookie developed for royalty end up in the cookbook designed for every lady in North America? It was thanks to a French pastry chef, Francois Pierre de La Varenne, who published Le Pâtissier François in the middle of the 1600s. This book dedicated an entire chapter to making macarons and was the only cookbook devoted to pastry to be published in France for nearly 150 years. While many French professional chefs felt that trade secrets (like using whipped egg whites as a means of leavening) should be kept secret to professionals. 

Trade confectioners were likely the bridge between chef and home cook. Mrs. Crowen spent four years gathering and testing recipes before Every Lady’s Book and its publication. Working on her book in New York City she would have had access to many professionals to help any obstacles that came from adapting recipes from professional kitchen to the home. 

We know that a local publisher bought the rights and produced Every Lady’s Book locally, but how well suited was a cookbook from New York City for residents of St. Catharines in the 1840s? Thanks to the construction of the Welland Canal the recipes of Every Lady’s Book would be more representative of what was coming out of St. Catharines kitchen’s than Catharine Parr Trails,’ Female Emigrant Guide of the 1850s. Parr-Trails experiences are reflective of the ‘bush’ near Peterborough, Ontario of the 1850s. By that point St. Catharines had become an important centre for marine trade and had built a large village settlement. 

As early as 1834 there is an announcement that Edward Emery has taken over Dwight Smith’s confectionary apparatus. Mr. Emery wished the public to know he planned to continue to run the business as it had been under Mr. Smith and would be occupying the same village stand. Among the goods Mr. Emery will sell: Candy, Bull’s-eyes and sugar toys. While not specifically stated that he stocked macaroons Mrs. Crowen’s claim that this recipe ‘produces Macaroons as good as any confectioner’ implies that as a confectioner one of Mr. Emery’s candies could have been macaroons. 

 While the sugar and almonds for this recipe may have been difficult to obtain for settlers farther inland in Ontario, Niagara’s position between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario has made for an advantageous place to secure luxury items. The ledger book of Captain Daniel Servos of Niagara- on- the- Lake, lists the cost of a sugar loaf as being $0.30/lb in the 1790s. While it is very difficult to obtain a direct comparison in 2024 prices that 1 lb or 454 gm of sugar would cost $14.50 CND in 2024. For comparison’s sake the same source lists a labourer’s daily wage as being $0.50/day ($23.20 CND in 2024) meaning that while sugar was available in Niagara it remained a luxury item for many.  

That sugar loaf would be very different from the white bagged sugar we buy from the grocery store today. Demand for sugar skyrocketed during the Victorian era and in 1854 Canada’s first sugar refinery opened. The Canada Sugar Refining Company (today known as Redpath Sugar), opened on the bank of the Lachine Canal in Quebec to much success. Further advancements in technology throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries now allow us to enjoy 2KG bags of sugar for $3.27CND today. The half pound of sugar needed for the Almond Macaroon recipe would have cost $7.24 cents in the 1790s for colonial white sugar and costs us $0.37 for modern white sugar. Approximately 19 times the price. What changed to account for this drastic difference? 

Prior to the construction of the Canal, imported commodities coming from England would have had to travel portage routes to reach Niagara and beyond from Montreal. In 1828, the Welland Canal Company published the cost of shipping via this route. It is worth noting that shipping across the Atlantic is not where the bulk of the cost was rather that portaging between Montreal and Prescott and then across Niagara was where the largest import fees were concentrated. 

The Welland Canal and its American counterpart the Erie Canal opened the region up to a wealth of food commodities. In a September 1835 edition of The British American Journal an ad for a grocery store that boasts a stock of 5,000 lbs of sugar and 2,000 lbs of Almonds. This purveyor of fine goods promises them at ‘reduced prices. With access to the ingredients at a reasonable price locally the only thing left to do is to put the recipe to test at home. 

The Recipe

Modern bakers may find that there are bits of information that have been omitted that can be found in most modern-day recipes. This can be compounded by not knowing what the final cookie should resemble. Many historical recipes are missing elements that we would add in today. The oldest recipes are often a list of ingredients and nothing more in the way of instruction. By the 1840s cookbook authors were providing some basic instruction but often it may appear that part of the recipe is missing. Usually, it is because the author assumes that the reader would have knowledge of the technique that is missing. 

The following breakdown should prove helpful for anyone interested in giving this taste of history a try.