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Ratafias
Blanch two ounces each of bitter and sweet almonds, put the almonds into a mortar with half pound of lump sugar, pound until fine and pass it through a wire sieve, then add the whites of five eggs, mixing one at a time. Continue to pound and mix with the pestle until it is formed into a stiff paste; then drop this paste on white letter paper about the size of a dollar (each drop) at equal distances from each other, put slips of blanched almonds on each drop, dust with white sugar and bake until they are browned throughout.
This is a bitter-almond macaroon of the older European type, and the bitter almonds are not a flavouring quirk that can be scaled down or waved through — they are the reason the recipe cannot be followed.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the almond's own enzyme converts to hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding blanched kernels in a mortar with egg white does. Two ounces is roughly 50 to 60 kernels, well inside the range that has caused serious poisoning, and the batch is divided into small biscuits eaten several at a time.
- Baking does not make it safeHeat destroys the enzyme but does not reliably drive off cyanide already liberated in a wet, sugary paste, and these are baked only until browned. Raw bitter almonds are in any case not an ordinary retail item in the United States; the FDA treats them as unsafe for sale as food.
- Almond extract is not a substitute hereModern almond flavouring is benzaldehyde, either synthetic or steam-distilled and stripped of cyanide. It gives the aroma the recipe is after, but that makes it a different formula, not this one. Use a current ratafia or almond macaroon recipe rather than adapting this text.
- What the historical terms meanLump sugar is plain loaf sugar broken up, equivalent to granulated for pounding purposes; "white sugar" for dusting is what we would call caster or superfine. "White letter paper" is unglazed writing paper, used as a baking surface where we would use parchment; the recipe itself says nothing about how the drops were removed from it.
- Scale of the dropsA dollar coin of the period is close to 38 mm, so the biscuits were about an inch and a half across — roughly 30 to 36 from this quantity of paste.
Ratafia began as a name for a sweetened cordial flavoured with fruit kernels, and by the eighteenth century it had transferred to the small hard almond biscuits eaten with it and used to line trifles and charlottes. The bitter almond was the whole point: it supplied the sharp, marzipan-adjacent aroma that plain sweet almonds cannot, and cooks of the period measured it out alongside sweet almonds ine two ounces of each in this recipe. That its danger was underestimated is clear from books like this one, still printing the quantity unremarked at the turn of the twentieth century; the reformulation of "ratafia essence" into a benzaldehyde flavouring, and the disappearance of the bitter kernel from ordinary retail sale, came later. These were garnish and dessert furniture rather than a biscuit for the tea tray.