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Almond Cheesecakes
Blanch and pound four ounces of sweet and five or six bitter almonds with a few drops of water; add a quarter of a pound of sugar rubbed with lemon-rind, a spoonful of cream, a small piece of butter, and the white of two eggs thoroughly whisked. Mix, and fill small tartlettins, lined with puff paste, and bake in a moderate oven for twenty minutes. Probable cost, 8d.
The hinge of this recipe is the bitter almonds, and they are the reason it cannot be made today. Everything else about it is a straightforward baked almond tartlet; the flavouring is the problem.
- Bitter almonds are the hazardBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding with a few drops of water does. The five or six here is the small traditional flavouring proportion, divided among several tarts, rather than a large dose; but the margin is narrow, and children are more vulnerable than adults at the same portion size.
- Baking does not make them safeTwenty minutes in a moderate oven inside a wet filling cannot be relied on to drive off hydrogen cyanide. Commercial bitter-almond products are processed so that the cyanide is removed; a domestic tartlet tin is not that process.
- You could not buy them anywayRaw bitter almonds cannot legally be sold for eating in the United States and are restricted in many other countries. What survives of the flavour in modern shops is bitter almond essence or extract, which is a different product made to a controlled specification.
- Sweet almonds are not a fixSimply leaving out the bitter almonds gives a bland filling, because the whole point of the five or six was to supply the benzaldehyde note the sweet almonds lack. If you want this flavour, work from a current recipe written around a modern flavouring rather than adapting this one.
- "Probable cost, 8d."Eightpence — the book gives a probable cost for most of its recipes, a habit that dates it firmly to the pre-decimal British kitchen.
Almond cheesecakes of this kind contain no cheese at all: by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries "cheesecake" in English usage had come to mean any small rich tart baked in a pastry case, the curd having in many versions been replaced by ground almonds, eggs and butter. Bitter almonds were a common flavouring in that tradition, used in the same sparing proportion — a few bitter to several ounces of sweet — that this recipe gives, and they appear through Georgian and Victorian confectionery in ratafias, macaroons and almond puddings. Some nineteenth-century writers noted that the nut was dangerous in quantity; whether the small numbers specified in recipes reflect that caution or simply the strength of the flavouring is not clear, and either way the margin falls well short of what is now considered acceptable. The rubbing of sugar against lemon rind to draw out the oil is a period technique worth remembering in its own right; sugar saturated with citrus oil in this way is known today as oleo-saccharum.