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Apricot Ice (Take two dozen apricots pare)
Take two dozen apricots, pare and grate, blanching a few of the kernels; when well pounded add to the fruit which has been grated. Pour over this a pint of water, also the juice of one lemon. When it has stood for about one hour, strain, adding a pound of sugar as you begin to freeze.
The fruit, sugar and lemon here are unremarkable; the kernels are not. This recipe cannot be recommended as written.
- The kernels are the problemApricot kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and moistened. Pounding raw blanched kernels into a wet fruit purée is precisely the condition that liberates it, and nothing in this recipe ever applies heat.
- No cooking stepUnlike a custard base or a boiled syrup, an ice like this is mixed cold, rested an hour, strained and frozen. There is no stage at which volatile cyanide could be driven off, and freezing does nothing to reduce it.
- "A few" is not a quantityFood safety authorities give guidance for raw apricot kernels in single figures per day for an adult, with children far more sensitive. An unspecified "few" pounded into a batch that will be divided unevenly among servings puts the dose entirely outside control.
- Bitter and sweet kernels differKernel amygdalin content varies enormously between apricot varieties, and the bitter ones — the ones prized for this almond-like flavour — are the highest. Bitter and sweet can be told apart by taste, but no cook, period or modern, can judge from a count of kernels how much amygdalin a batch contains.
- If you want the flavourThe almond-cherry note the kernels supply is what a modern recipe achieves with almond extract or a commercial noyau-style flavouring, both made under controlled conditions. Use a current apricot sorbet recipe rather than adapting this one.
- For reference onlyThe remaining proportions are straightforward and give a sense of period practice: two dozen apricots grated to a pulp, a pint of water, one lemon's juice, and a pound of sugar stirred in at the start of churning — a very sweet ice by modern taste, since sugar was doing the work of keeping the texture soft.
Fruit ices reached American household books largely through the European confectioner's tradition, in which the kernels of stone fruit were used to reinforce the faint almond note that apricots, peaches and cherries share with their own pits; the French noyau is the stone itself, the kernel within it the amande. Some period books print such an instruction without comment. The danger was not entirely unknown: poisoning cases from bitter almonds and stone-fruit kernels appear in nineteenth-century medical literature. In time the practice of pounding an unspecified number of raw kernels into an uncooked, unheated mixture stopped being defensible, and the flavour moved to bottled extracts made from processed sources.