Passover commemorates the Jewish people’s hasty Exodus from Egypt. The Bible tells that this left no time for even the bread to rise, so yeast-leavened and most wheat products are symbolically avoided during Passover, and substituted with ground almonds and potato flour. Most British Jews from an Ashkenazic (Central or Eastern European) background, even those who don’t often eat biscuits, will find themselves unable to drink a cup of tea at Passover without a plate of these almond macaroons on the table to at least look at.
My family have been making them for generations, even in the 1940s when almonds were scarce, and eggs and sugar were rationed. Kosher-prepared almonds weren’t available, so my great-grandmother would crack, blanch and grind them all by hand. My own mother recalls my grandmother getting fed up with chiselling the macaroons off the baking sheets so she made them in paper cases – where they still stuck. Mum didn’t know that macaroons weren’t supposed to have paper stuck to them until she spent a Passover with her mother-in-law, who was a much more patient baker!