What's the difference?
Macarons are the core of our business. Two delicate, sweet, almond-based meringues sandwiching a delicious chocolate ganache or rich buttercream. Getting the bake exactly right on a macaron is a real skill but when you get it right, they make a perfectly indulgent treat.
The similarly-named ‘macaroons’ are a dollop of whisked egg white flavoured with coconut. Hard to mess up, macaroons make a lovely introduction to baking with children. The words are so similar that people often mix them up! Here’s the story of how the words evolved.
Linguistic Difficulties
A loanword is a word borrowed straight from a neighbouring language. The English language is full of loanwords from our neighbours over the channel. Many of our food words have French origins. Words that were borrowed a long time ago tend to diverge in pronunciation over time. So, loanwords like ‘fruit’ and ‘biscuit’ (that came over from France with the Norman invasion in the 11th Century) are spelled the same in both languages – but pronounced very differently in French: ‘fwee’ and ‘bisquee’.
A Family of French Loanwords
‘Macaroon’ belongs with ‘balloon’ and ‘saloon’ as loanwords that started life as French words spelled with a single ‘o’. All these words are first noted in English around about the 16th Century. At this time, ‘macaroon’ in England and ‘macaron’ in France both meant sweet almond biscuit.
Semantic Drift
The process by which words change their meaning over time is known as semantic drift. The English ‘macaroon’ gradually decoupled itself from its French equivalent and the word became attached to other referents, settling eventually on the coconut treat described above. Meanwhile in France, the macaron was evolving too (see our blog on the history of the French Macaron for more details). The almond biscuit was sandwiched together with its twin and filled with creamy ganache – forming the treat we know and love today.
The Modern Macaron
Macarons are a versatile treat and they have exploded in popularity in the UK in the Twenty-First Century. However, languages (or, more accurately, people using language) are slow to change. The word ‘macaron’ is becoming ensconced in the English vocabulary, but its cousin ‘macaroon’ shows no signs of abating.