Home › The Principles of Cookery › Almond Cake, Plain
Almond Cake, Plain
Blanch and pound in a mortar three ounces of sweet almonds and seven or eight bitter almonds. Rub the rind of a lemon upon four ounces of loaf sugar, and pound this with the almonds. Add the yolks of four eggs well beaten, and a piece of butter the size of a walnut. Work in a quarter of a pound of fine flour, and, lastly, the whites of the eggs beaten to a solid froth. Put into a well-buttered mould, and bake in a good oven. Time, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 1s.
This cake cannot be made as printed. The problem is not the method but one of the ingredients, which is no longer treated as food.
- Bitter almonds are the hinge, and they are toxicThe seven or eight bitter almonds are there for flavour, but bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted into a batter. The pounding step in a mortar is precisely what liberates it.
- The quantity is not trivialBitter almonds carry on the order of several milligrams of releasable cyanide each, and the toxic dose for a child is counted in single nuts. A recipe calling for seven or eight in a small cake is outside any range a modern kitchen should work in.
- Baking does not make it safeHeat drives off some hydrogen cyanide, but a buttered mould baked for three-quarters of an hour is not a reliable detoxification process, and nothing in the recipe controls for it. Commercial bitter-almond products are processed to remove the cyanide under measured conditions; a domestic oven does not do that.
- You will not find the ingredient anywaySale of raw bitter almonds for eating is restricted or prohibited in the United States and tightly controlled elsewhere. What is sold today as "bitter almond" is almost always an extract or oil, sold precisely because the hazardous fraction has been removed.
- What to do insteadIf you want a plain lemon-and-almond sponge of this kind, use a current recipe. Do not attempt to substitute your way through this one.
Bitter almonds were a standard flavouring in nineteenth-century confectionery, valued for the intense marzipan note that sweet almonds alone cannot give; ratafias, macaroons, blancmanges and cakes of this type all leaned on a few of them, and Victorian cookery books specify them alongside the sweet kind as though they were merely a stronger grade of the same thing. The danger was not unknown -- works on poisons of the period discuss prussic acid from almonds and cherry kernels -- yet domestic books went on printing the proportions for decades. The rest of the method is thoroughly of its time: sugar came in a loaf, so the lemon rind is rubbed against it to catch the oil; butter measured by comparison to a walnut; and the whites whipped separately to raise the cake. "A good oven" was a heat the cook judged by hand rather than by dial.