Home › The Principles of Cookery › Almond Diamonds
Almond Diamonds
Blanch and pound six ounces of sweet almonds; add six ounces of finely-sifted sugar, and mix them to a stiff paste with some white of egg. Strew a little sugar on the board, and roll out the paste to the thickness of a penny-piece, then stamp it into diamonds with a pastry-cutter. Bake in a cool oven, and when cold, brush them over with a little syrup, strew sugar over them, and dry them in the oven. Time to bake, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for about two dozen diamonds.
A plain almond-paste biscuit, close kin to marzipan tiles and to the ratafia family. The whole recipe hinges on the paste being stiff enough to roll and the oven being low enough not to colour it.
- "A cool oven"Roughly 275-300F. These are meant to dry pale, not brown, so keep well below a browning heat. For the second drying, after the syrup glaze, a lower heat still is safest; the recipe says only to dry them in the oven.
- Twenty minutes is a guide, not a ruleAt 300F thin diamonds may be firm in 12-15 minutes. Take them out when the surface is dry and matte and the undersides are barely sandy; they harden further as they cool.
- Blanch and poundPour boiling water over the almonds, stand two minutes, and slip the skins off. A food processor replaces the mortar, but pulse in bursts — worked continuously the almonds heat and turn to butter, and the paste becomes greasy and unrollable. Ground almonds from a packet work, though the texture is finer and less interesting.
- Equal weightsSix ounces each of almonds and sugar is about 170 g of each. "Finely-sifted sugar" here means sugar sifted fine, closer to modern caster than to icing sugar.
- White of eggAdd it a teaspoon at a time. The paste should just hold together and take a rolling pin; one large white is usually near the limit, and too much makes a batter you cannot stamp. The white is baked and then dried, so it should not remain raw.
- The thickness of a penny-pieceA Victorian penny was around 2 mm thick, so roll thin — a sixteenth of an inch or so, and in any case no thicker than an eighth. Roll on sugar rather than flour, and lift the shapes with a palette knife onto a parchment-lined tray.
- The syrup glazeAny thin sugar syrup (equal sugar and water, boiled briefly) brushed on lightly, then dusted with sugar and returned to the oven, gives the frosted crust. Brush sparingly or the biscuits soften and stick.
- Yield and keepingAbout two dozen, as stated. Stored airtight they keep two to three weeks and improve after a day; the almond flavour comes forward as they dry.
Almond pastes of this kind sit at the older end of English confectionery, related to the marchpane of Tudor and Stuart banquets, when pounded almonds and sugar were shaped, stamped and dried rather than baked in the modern sense. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the later nineteenth century, such sweetmeats were well established in the domestic kitchen as well as the confectioner's shop, and the book's habit of quoting a "probable cost" — a shilling here — suggests a readership keeping a close eye on the housekeeping accounts. A diamond is an economical shape, since cutting parallel lines twice on the diagonal leaves little trim from an expensive paste, though how far that explains the prevalence of period lozenges is guesswork.