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Almond Jumbles
Work two ounces of butter into half a pound of flour, then add two table-spoonfuls of sifted sugar, a little lemon-juice, and two ounces of sweet and four or five bitter almonds, blanched and beaten to a paste with the white of an egg. Mix thoroughly, roll it out rather thin, cut into small round cakes, place them on well-oiled tins, and bake in a quick oven. Time to bake, ten minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 4d. per pound.
The problem here is not technique but one ingredient. Bitter almonds are a controlled, toxic seed in most countries today, and this recipe puts several of them raw into a small batch of biscuits.
- Bitter almonds are the reason to stopBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed, wetted and left to sit — exactly what happens when they are pounded to a paste with egg white. Sweet almonds contain only traces; bitter almonds contain enough that a small number can constitute a meaningful dose, particularly for a child.
- The quantity is not trivialFour or five bitter almonds in a half-pound of flour is a noticeable flavouring, and it is not a dose modern guidance would leave unmeasured. Hydrogen cyanide is volatile and baking will drive off some of it, but the method gives no control over how much remains.
- They are not sold as foodRaw bitter almonds are banned or restricted from retail sale in the United States, the UK, the EU and Australia. Anything labelled "bitter almond" on a supermarket shelf today is almond extract or bitter almond oil, from which the cyanogenic compounds have been removed — a different material entirely, not a substitution the recipe anticipates.
- Sweet almonds were never the issueThe two ounces of sweet almonds, blanched and ground, are ordinary baking almonds and perfectly safe. It is only the bitter addition, included for its intense marzipan aroma, that puts the recipe out of reach. If you want almond biscuits of this type, use a current recipe.
- Reading the old costing"1s. 4d. per pound" is one shilling and fourpence, a per-pound price for the finished biscuits rather than a total. Costings of this kind run throughout the book, and they date it as firmly as any preface.
Jumbles are among the oldest named English biscuits, appearing in printed cookery from the sixteenth century onward, usually as a thin sweet paste rolled into ropes and knotted or coiled — the name is often traced to that looped, twisted shape rather than to any jumbling of ingredients, though the derivation is not settled. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the late nineteenth century plain rounds cut from rolled dough, as here, were also in use, and the family had spread across the Atlantic, where the American "jumble" persisted as a crisp ring-shaped cookie. Bitter almonds were a common flavouring in a Victorian larder: cooks used a few, pounded with sweet almonds, to get the deep marzipan note that ratafias, macaroons and almond puddings all depended on. The danger was understood in outline — nineteenth-century texts warn against excess — and recipes like this one went on calling for them by the handful.