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Almond and Bread Pudding
Blanch and pound three ounces of sweet and six or seven bitter almonds, and allow them to simmer gently in half a pint of milk by the side of the fire for a quarter of an hour, to draw out the flavour. Then pour them into four ounces of moderately stale crumbs of bread. Stir in a quarter of a pound of beef suet finely shred, two table-spoonfuls of moist sugar, the same of flour, the finely-minced rind and the juice of a lemon, and two well-beaten eggs. Beat the whole thoroughly, and pour it into a well-oiled mould; let it boil without stopping for three hours, and serve with sweet sauce. Sufficient for four or five persons. Probable cost, 10d.
The pudding itself is a plain boiled suet-and-crumb batter, but its flavouring makes it unmakeable today: six or seven bitter almonds, steeped in hot milk and eaten whole in the mixture.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds (the kernels of Prunus amygdalus var. amara) contain amygdalin, which the nut's own enzyme converts to hydrogen cyanide once the kernel is crushed and wetted. Pounding them and simmering them in milk is precisely the process that liberates it.
- The quantity is not trivialEstimates for a single bitter almond run to a few milligrams of hydrogen cyanide. Divided among four or five servings the dose per person here is small, but it is unmeasured, it varies from kernel to kernel, and the margin in children, who take a proportionally larger dose per pound of body weight, is narrower than in adults.
- Simmering does not remove itFifteen minutes by the side of the fire and three hours in a boiling mould will drive off some of the volatile cyanide, but the recipe pours the pounded almonds and their milk into the batter and keeps everything. Nothing here is discarded, so nothing is reliably detoxified.
- You cannot buy them anywayRaw bitter almonds are barred from retail sale in the United States and restricted across much of Europe. What survives commercially is bitter almond extract or almond flavouring, from which the cyanogenic compounds have been removed, and the two are not interchangeable in a recipe that treats the kernels as a bulk ingredient.
- If you want a boiled almond puddingUse a current recipe. A modern version of this dish relies on sweet almonds plus a measured almond extract, and it should be followed as written rather than patched onto this one.
Bitter almonds were a standard nineteenth-century flavouring, valued because their scent — benzaldehyde, the smell we now call "marzipan" or "cherry" — is far stronger than anything sweet almonds give. Victorian cookery writers used them by the half-dozen in blancmanges, ratafias, custards and puddings like this one, and Cassell's assumes no comment is needed. The danger was known: nineteenth-century medical journals and toxicology manuals record deaths from bitter almonds and from ratafia essences, and household writers occasionally warned against a heavy hand. Regulation came later, and the commercial answer was benzaldehyde-based almond flavouring, which delivers the aroma without the amygdalin. The rest of the recipe is thoroughly of its type: stale crumbs, shredded beef suet, moist (unrefined) sugar and a boiled mould, the cheap and forgiving architecture of English pudding-making, priced here at tenpence.}