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Almond Drink
Put six ounces of ground sweet almonds and two ounces of ground bitter almonds into a saucepan with one quart of water, and let it simmer for a quarter of an hour; then add one pound of loaf sugar, broken small, and when dissolved strain through a bag or sieve. When cold it is ready for use. A table-spoonful of orange-flower water added is a great improvement. One wine-glassful of this mixture put in a tumbler with a bottle of soda water is a most excellent and refreshing drink. Probable cost, 1s. without the soda water.
This is a sweet almond syrup for mixing with soda water, and it would be unremarkable but for the two ounces of bitter almonds. That ingredient puts the recipe out of reach.
- Why the bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the nut's own enzyme converts to hydrogen cyanide as soon as the kernels are ground and wetted. Two ounces of ground bitter almonds steeped in a quart of water, with the water then kept and drunk, is a meaningful dose rather than a trace.
- Simmering does not make it safeSimmering is not a reliable safeguard -- A quarter of an hour at a simmer will drive off some hydrogen cyanide, which is volatile, but it is also very soluble in water and an unknown quantity stays behind in the liquid, which is here strained, sweetened and kept. Commercial bitter almond flavouring is distilled and then specifically treated to remove prussic acid, which is not what happens in a saucepan.
- The ingredient is no longer soldRaw bitter almonds cannot legally be sold for food in the United States and are restricted in much of Europe, so the recipe cannot be followed as written even in principle. If you want an almond syrup for soda water, use a current recipe.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up with nippers before use; it is simply granulated white sugar in modern terms. The instruction to break it small is only about dissolving speed.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, usually as orange blossom water, and still made by distilling bitter orange blossom. Modern bottlings vary a great deal in strength, and a tablespoon of a concentrated one would overwhelm a quart.
- The measuresA wine-glassful in this period is roughly two fluid ounces, a quarter cup. A "bottle of soda water" means one of the period's small single-serve aerated water bottles, on the order of six to ten ounces, not a modern litre bottle.
- "Probable cost, 1s."One shilling, twelve old pence. The book gives probable costs throughout so a household could budget a dish before committing to it, and the figure is a useful reminder that almonds were a considered purchase rather than a pantry staple.
Almond drinks descend from the medieval and early modern tradition of almond milk and orgeat, in which pounded almonds and sugar stood in for dairy on fast days and in hot weather. The bitter almond was valued precisely for the sharp marzipan note that sweet almonds lack, and Victorian cookery used it freely in ratafias, blancmanges and confectionery, though the danger of prussic acid in bitter almonds and their oil was already documented in nineteenth-century medical writing. What dates this particular entry is the soda water: the siphon and the bottled aerated water were fixtures of the late-Victorian household, and syrups like this one were kept ready in the larder so that a cold drink could be assembled on demand.