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Almond Cake, Rich
Whisk and strain six eggs, mix them with four ounces of pounded sweet almonds, half an ounce of pounded bitter almonds, and six ounces of sifted sugar; sift in six ounces of flour, beating constantly all the time. Then add six ounces of butter, which must be melted, but not hot, a small portion at a time, beating very thoroughly as each portion is added, and lastly the finely grated rind of a lemon. Line a cake tin with buttered paper, and rather more than half fill it with the mixture. Bake in a well-heated oven for about an hour, covering the top with a buttered paper when sufficiently coloured. Test with a small skewer or knife in the usual way. Probable cost, 2s.
The hinge of this recipe is the half-ounce of bitter almonds, and it is the reason the cake cannot be made today as printed.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which converts to hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding them into a batter does. Half an ounce is roughly 14 g, mixed into a single cake.
- Baking does not make them safeSome volatile hydrogen cyanide is driven off by heat, but the loss is not reliable or measurable in a domestic oven, and it varies with the kernels themselves. Nineteenth-century cooks used bitter almonds routinely; the margin between flavouring and poisoning was never quantified.
- You cannot buy them anywayRaw bitter almonds are prohibited from sale in the United States and restricted in many other countries. What is sold as "bitter almond" today is usually an essence or oil from which the cyanogenic compounds have been removed, and it is not a like-for-like substitution by weight into this formula.
- Sweet almonds are a separate ingredient hereThe four ounces of pounded sweet almonds are harmless; they are the body of the cake. It is only the additional half-ounce of bitter almonds, added purely for perfume, that puts the recipe out of range.
- If you want the cakeUse a current almond cake recipe from a modern source rather than adapting this one. The rest of the method is unremarkable — a whisked egg-and-sugar batter enriched with melted butter — and is well covered by any contemporary genoise or almond sponge.
- On the costing"Probable cost, 2s." is two shillings, a Victorian retail estimate Cassell's attached to most entries so a household could budget. It is a period detail, not an instruction.
Bitter almonds were a standard flavouring in British and Continental baking through the nineteenth century, valued because they carry the intense marzipan note that sweet almonds lack — the compound responsible, benzaldehyde, is released by the same reaction that releases the cyanide. Cookery writers of the period knew the kernels were dangerous in quantity, and some cautioned against using them freely, though many recipes of the era, including this one, carry no caution at all; the risk was treated as a matter of proportion rather than prohibition, and recipes calling for half an ounce against several ounces of sweet almonds are common in books of this generation. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, an enormous alphabetical compendium aimed at the late-Victorian middle-class household, collected such formulas wholesale; the "rich" in the title may be meant to distinguish this butter-and-egg cake from the plainer almond cakes elsewhere in the same book, though the book itself does not say so. Modern commercial almond essence descends directly from this practice, benzaldehyde having been isolated and then synthesised so that the flavour could be had without the kernel.