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Almond Custard
Place in a saucepan over the fire a pint of new milk or cream, with a few lumps of sugar rubbed on the rind of a lemon, a piece of cinnamon, and four bitter almonds. Let it simmer gently for ten minutes. Blanch and pound two ounces of sweet almonds, with a little rose-water to prevent oiling. Mix the ingredients well together, and add the yolks of four eggs, well beaten. Stir the custard gently over a moderate fire until it thickens, but on no account allow it to boil; and pour into glasses. Probable cost, made with milk, 9d. Sufficient for six or seven glasses.
This is a straightforward stirred egg custard flavoured in the old style, but one of its four flavouring ingredients is the reason it cannot be reproduced today.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the almond's own enzyme converts to hydrogen cyanide as soon as the kernel is crushed, wetted or warmed. Raw bitter almonds are commonly cited at roughly 4-9 mg of releasable cyanide each, which is why their sale for eating is prohibited or tightly restricted in the United States and much of Europe.
- The quantity is not trivially smallThe quantity is small but variable -- Four kernels infused into one pint and divided among six or seven glasses is a fraction of a kernel per serving, well below an adult toxic dose, though the potency of individual kernels varies widely and the margin for a child is smaller. This recipe, like others of its date, treats bitter almonds simply as a flavouring and makes no allowance for that variation.
- Simmering does not make them safeSimmering cannot be relied on to make them safe -- Heat destroys the enzyme but amygdalin itself survives it. Free hydrogen cyanide is volatile and some will be driven off in an open pan, but by how much is unpredictable, so cooking does not reliably render the infusion harmless.
- The custard is also undercooked by designThe custard is taken only to thickening -- Stirred custards are deliberately held below boiling, and this one is taken only to the point of thickening, with no temperature given. Thickening normally occurs above the temperature at which egg yolk is pasteurised, but nothing in the instructions measures it.
- If you want this flavourThe almond note here is what modern recipes get from a few drops of almond extract. Use a current published recipe for a lemon or almond pouring custard rather than adapting this one.
Bitter almonds were a standard sweet-kitchen flavouring across eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, valued precisely because sweet almonds taste of very little: the characteristic "almond" perfume of marzipan, ratafia biscuits, noyau and blancmange came from benzaldehyde in the bitter kernel, or from peach and apricot stones used the same way. The book treats them as casually as cinnamon, and the pairing here with sugar rubbed on lemon rind, and with rose-water pounded into the sweet almonds to stop them oiling, is a recipe of long descent, close to the almond creams of Georgian confectionery manuals. The chemistry was understood by the time this book appeared, and prussic acid poisonings from flavourings were reported through the Victorian period; domestic books nonetheless went on printing the older proportions.