Home › The Principles of Cookery › Almond Flummery
Almond Flummery
Cover one ounce of gelatine with water; let it stand half an hour, then pour upon it a pint and a half of boiling milk or cream that has been flavoured with one ounce of sweet and one ounce of bitter almonds which have been previously blanched and pounded, and eight or nine lumps of sugar--in the lump, for fear of dust--on which a little lemon has been rubbed. Stir the mixture occasionally till cool, to prevent a scum forming. Strain it carefully. Pour it into a mould which has been wetted with cold water, and let it stand until quite firm. If liked, isin-glass may be used instead of gelatine. Probable cost, if made with milk, 1s. Sufficient for a quart mould, which will be enough for six or eight persons.
This is a set almond cream in the blancmange family, and the flavouring is the problem: an ounce of bitter almonds is a genuinely dangerous quantity, not a period exaggeration.
- Bitter almonds are the hinge, and they are toxicBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernels are crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding them and pouring hot milk over them does. An ounce is roughly 20 to 25 kernels, well into the range where adults report poisoning symptoms and far beyond what is tolerable for a child.
- Nothing in the method removes the cyanideNothing in the method reliably removes the cyanide -- the almonds are pounded and infused in hot milk, then the mixture is cooled, strained and set. HCN is volatile, but the recipe specifies no prolonged heating that would drive it off, and the flavouring compounds the cook wants are extracted into the very liquid that is eaten cold.
- The portion size makes it worseA quart mould serving six or eight means each person takes a meaningful share of a single ounce of bitter kernels. The dose is not diluted away by the milk; it is simply divided among the diners.
- Bitter almonds are no longer sold as foodRaw bitter almonds cannot legally be sold for eating in the United States and are restricted in a number of other countries. Where they persist it is largely in commercial processing (extract, marzipan, amaretti), where the cyanogenic content is reduced or removed, or the flavour is supplied synthetically.
- Almond extract is not a substitute hereBottled bitter-almond or almond extract is safe and gives the same flavour note, but a swap does not rescue this recipe as written — the quantities, and the whole blanch-and-pound step, were built around whole kernels. Use a current blancmange or panna cotta recipe instead.
- Sugar in the lumpThe instruction to use loaf sugar "for fear of dust" suggests a period when loose sugar was stored open and picked up dirt. It also allows the lumps to be rubbed on lemon peel to take up the oil, a common period method of getting citrus flavour.
- IsinglassThe alternative setting agent is a collagen gelatine made from the swim bladders of fish, once the finer choice for clear jellies. It is now sold chiefly for fining beer and wine rather than for setting puddings.
Flummery began in Britain as a genuinely humble dish -- a sour, jellied porridge of steeped oatmeal, its name generally traced to the Welsh llymru. By the eighteenth century the word had migrated up the table to mean any moulded, quivering cream set with isinglass or hartshorn, and by the time Cassell's was compiled it was largely interchangeable with blancmange. Bitter almond was a common flavouring across that whole family of dishes: it gave the marzipan-and-cherry note that Victorian cooks associated with almond sweets, and cookbooks of the period called for it freely, in ratafia biscuits, in creams and in puddings. The toxicity of amygdalin was known to nineteenth-century chemists -- cases of poisoning by almond flavouring were reported in the medical press -- but it took decades more for that knowledge to reach the domestic manual, and longer still for regulation to take bitter kernels out of the grocer's shop.