Macaroon Vs Macaron

Recipe And The Case Of The Missing 'O'

Quick Summary

Macaroon vs macaron only pops up in one’s head or social media feed when one gets into the thick of French haute cuisine, especially desserts. They are not the same, and the terms are not interchangeable either. Macaroons are more rustic, coconut bite-sized desserts, and their earlier versions, made using local almonds, used to be sold by nuns in France. Macarons are more refined, made with almond meringue, which had something to do with French queen Catherine de' Medici's Italian chefs.

Deep Dive

If you happen to be in a quaint cafe where the pastry chefs are worth their mettle, and you end up ordering a ‘macaroon’, what you will get is not the delicate almond sandwich cookie but a rough coconut mound instead. It’s a mistaken identity, sometimes seen as a typo, as that single extra ‘o’, or rather, the missing one from a macaron recipe, makes a world of difference. There used to be a time when there was no macaroon vs macaron, and the terms meant the same thing, but that changed with sugar and coconut becoming more accessible. Read on for their history. 

The Backstory Of Macaroon Vs Macaron

In Sicily, centuries of Arab trade routes had left behind almonds, sugar and a taste for almond-paste sweets like marzipan. Local bakers, many of them working out of monastery kitchens, turned that paste into a simple biscuit of ground almonds, sugar and egg white, and gave it a name, ‘maccaruni’, that would eventually be split into three separate English words: macaroni, macaron and macaroon.

For roughly three hundred years after that biscuit reached France, there was no mystery to solve. ‘Macaron’ and ‘macaroon’ were the same cookie, spelt two ways in two languages, the way French words ending with ‘in’ or ‘on’ routinely picked up an English ‘oon’ (balloon, cartoon, platoon). Nobody was confused, because there was only one thing to be confused about.

The split happened for two unrelated reasons, a few decades apart, on two sides of a revolution. First, a convent of nuns in eastern France (Nancy) turned an almond biscuit that was reserved for religious occasions, called the amaretti, into a business for their survival, and their plain, unfilled version became the base for what France would come to call, simply, le macaron. Second, a shipping innovation made coconut cheap and durable enough to bake with anywhere, and an entirely different set of bakers, with no connection to the nuns or to France's love for adding almonds in baking, built a whole new cookie around it and kept the English spelling.

Macaron Vs Macaroon

The Mother Word For Macarons

Centuries of Arab trade and conquest in Sicily had left behind almonds, sugar and a taste for almond-paste sweets in the style of marzipan. By the 8th and 9th centuries, Italian bakers, many of them working out of monastery kitchens, were making an egg-and-almond biscuit, and turning that paste into a plain confection of ground almonds, sugar and whipped egg white. By 1279, Sicilian records had a word for it, which was ‘maccaruni’, which is the shared ancestor of three foods that would barely be related – macaroni, macaron and macaroon.

A Royal Wedding And Nuns

The biscuit crossed into France in 1533, when Catherine de' Medici arrived from Florence to marry the future King Henry II. Her Italian pastry chefs are credited with bringing the almond biscuit to French shores, along with the rest of the cooking techniques and ingredients from her homeland. For roughly two and a half centuries after that, there was nothing to untangle, and ‘macaron’ and ‘macaroon’ were simply the French and English spellings of the same plain almond biscuit.

That changed in 1793, in the eastern French city of Nancy, when two Benedictine nuns, Sister Marguerite Gaillot and Sister Marie-Élisabeth Morlot, had been baking almond biscuits at their convent, the Dames du Saint-Sacrement, where strict dietary rules made an egg-and-almond biscuit a useful stand-in for meat. When the French Revolution dissolved their religious order, the two sisters lost their home and had to earn a living. They turned to what they knew, baking and selling their convent's almond biscuit from a small shop to survive. 

Nancy took to it immediately, and the two women became known as les Sœurs Macarons or the Macaron Sisters. Their recipe, a plain, cracked-top, unfilled biscuit of just egg white, sugar and almonds, has been passed down for over two centuries and is still sold today, largely unchanged, at the Maison des Soeurs Macarons on the same Nancy street.

Coconut Becomes More Accessible

While that plain, unfilled biscuit was becoming France's own, an entirely unrelated shift was under way that had nothing to do with nuns, France, or even almonds. Through the 1800s, new shredding and desiccation methods made coconut cheap and stable enough to ship and store for the first time, instead of spoiling on the journey from the tropics. Bakers in France, Britain and the United States, working independently of Nancy's almond tradition, began swapping shredded coconut for ground almonds in the same basic formula of whipped egg white and sugar. The result was a simpler, denser, one-bowl cookie that kept the English spelling, ‘macaroon’. Because it was naturally flourless and unleavened, it was quickly adopted into Jewish kitchens as a Passover staple, a role coconut macaroons still hold today.

The Macaron Parisian Shift

Back in Paris, the almond side of the story kept moving too. Louis Ernest Ladurée opened his bakery on rue Royale in 1862, and by the early 1900s, a baker associated with the Ladurée family, Pierre Desfontaines, had the idea that would define the modern macaron – taking two of the plain almond shells and sandwiching them with ganache, buttercream or jam. There is a rival claim that credits baker Claude Gerbet with the same idea. That shift is what made the macaron recipe come into existence and cement the visual of colourful desserts in people’s minds.

The final push came a century later. In the mid-2000s, Paris pastry chef Pierre Hermé, known for pushing the macaron into inventive flavour territory well beyond plain almond, launched Jour du Macaron, Macaron Day, an annual charity event now marked by pâtissiers across multiple countries every March. It turned the French sandwich cookie into a global luxury item and, in the process, cemented the divide: ‘macaron’, the French spelling, for the elegant almond sandwich; ‘macaroon’, the English spelling, for the humble coconut mound that took a completely different, unconnected path to get there.

Two names from one 13th-century word. Two cookies built by two different sets of bakers who never met. That's the entire case behind the missing ‘O’.

The Timeline At A Glance

Macaroon vs Macaron Simplified 

Whether you are trying out a coconut macaroon recipe today or as an adventurous baker trying the colourful macaron recipe at home, their history makes them well worth trying. Although they may look and taste quite different, both treats show how recipes can change and develop as they travel between countries and generations. Their journey from a simple almond biscuit to the more popular dessert today is a reminder that food is not only about taste, but also about culture, creativity, and tradition.