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ALMOND CAKE (Small, for Tea)
Whisk and strain three eggs, mix them with two ounces of pounded sweet almonds, a quarter of an ounce of pounded bitter almonds, and three ounces of sifted sugar; sift in three ounces of flour, beating constantly all the time. Then add three ounces of melted butter, a little at a time, beating thoroughly as each portion is added; lastly add the grated rind of half a lemon, and beat all well together. Butter some patty-pans, and rather more than half fill each with the mixture. Bake in a well-heated oven, taking care that they are nicely browned but not burnt. This should take from twenty to thirty minutes. Probable cost, 1s.3d.
The problem is in the second ingredient line: a quarter of an ounce of pounded bitter almonds, which is not a flavouring a modern kitchen can safely use.
- Bitter almonds are the hazardBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernels are crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding them into a batter does. The bitterness that made them valued as a flavouring is the same compound that makes them poisonous.
- The quantity is not trivialA quarter of an ounce is roughly 7 g, on the order of six to ten kernels, divided among however many patty-pans the batter fills; the recipe does not say. Toxicity thresholds are lower for children than for adults.
- Baking does not make it safeHeat drives off some hydrogen cyanide, but the twenty- to thirty-minute bake this recipe specifies is not a controlled process and cannot be relied on to remove it. Commercial bitter-almond flavourings are processed to remove prussic acid under measured conditions, which a domestic oven does not reproduce.
- You will not find the ingredient anywayYou will not find the ingredient easily anyway -- Raw bitter almonds cannot legally be sold for eating in the United States, and are restricted in some other markets. Where the name survives on a bottle, it is usually a flavouring essence, not the kernel this recipe calls for.
- Not the same as ordinary almond flavourSweet almonds, marzipan, almond extract and apricot-kernel pastes are all different things with different regulatory status, and swapping one for another in an old recipe is guesswork. If you want small almond tea cakes, use a current recipe written for ingredients you can actually buy.
- What the cost line tells you1s. 3d. is Cassell's running estimate of the ingredient cost, not a price for the finished cakes. It is a useful reminder that these entries were written for households budgeting to the penny.
Bitter almonds were a standard Victorian confectioner's flavouring, sold by grocers and chemists alongside sweet almonds and used in ratafias, macaroons, blancmanges and puddings wherever a sharp, intense almond note was wanted; the ratafia biscuit takes its character from them. Their danger was known — nineteenth-century medical journals and household manuals both carried warnings, and poisoning cases involving almond flavourings and the related essence of mirbane appear in the period's reporting — but the knowledge sat alongside cheerful domestic use, and books of this kind went on printing them in tea-time cakes. The gradual replacement of the kernels by benzaldehyde-based essences, and later by regulation of what could be sold for eating, is why a recipe of this kind reads as ordinary in its own day and unusable now. The rest of the method is unremarkable Victorian small-cake practice: whole eggs whisked and strained, melted butter beaten in by degrees to keep the batter from splitting, and patty-pans filled rather more than half full.