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Almond Nougat
Blanch and chop roughly six ounces of sweet and five bitter almonds, and put them in a cool oven till they are slightly browned. Put three ounces of sifted sugar into a saucepan, and when it is dissolved throw in the almonds, and mix all together for a few minutes. The almonds must be hot when they are put into the saucepan. Spread the paste about a quarter of an inch thick, quickly and evenly on a well-oiled slab, cut it into fingers, strew some small white comfits over these, and arrange them in a pile. Or, the nougat may be spread on a well-oiled pie-dish, and when it has taken the form, turned out upon a dish. The nougat should be made and moulded as quickly as possible, or it will harden. Probable cost, 9d., for this quantity. Sufficient for a small dish.
This is a brown nougat — really a nut brittle — set in a caramel of dry sugar. The reason it cannot be made as written is the bitter almonds, which are not a flavouring variant of the sweet kind but a genuinely toxic ingredient.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted. Five nuts is a small, flavouring-scale quantity, but bitter almonds are genuinely toxic and the margin is narrower for a child.
- The gentle heat here does not make them safeHydrogen cyanide is volatile and can be substantially reduced by prolonged boiling or steam treatment, and commercial bitter-almond flavouring was purified along broadly these lines. Slight browning in a cool oven followed by a few minutes in warm sugar does nothing of the kind.
- You will not find them anywayRaw bitter almonds cannot legally be sold for food in the United States and are restricted in many other countries. Anything sold plainly as "almonds" is the sweet variety.
- What Victorian cooks were afterThe bitter nuts supplied the intense marzipan note that sweet almonds lack — the same note now sold as almond extract. Use a current confectionery recipe rather than adjusting this one.
- Oven wording, for referenceA "cool oven" is conventionally rendered as somewhere around 250-300F in modern equivalences; the recipe itself gives no figure. Here it serves only to warm and lightly colour the nuts before they meet the sugar.
- ComfitsThe "small white comfits" are hard sugar-coated seeds or nonpareils, the ancestors of modern sprinkles; the plain white sugar pearls sold for cake decoration are the nearest thing.
- Cost9d. is ninepence in pre-decimal currency, three-quarters of a shilling.
Nougat takes its name through Occitan nogat, from a Latin root meaning nut, and by the nineteenth century the word covered two quite different sweets: the white, aerated, egg-white and honey nougat of Montélimar, and this darker sort, made by binding toasted nuts in melted sugar and better known to pastry cooks as nougatine. The technique — dry sugar melted, hot nuts stirred in, the mass spread on an oiled slab before it sets — is the foundation of praline, almond hardbake and a good deal of decorative sugar work. The casual call for bitter almonds alongside sweet is entirely of its period: they were used a few at a time for flavouring blancmanges, ratafias and macaroons, and their toxicity, though known, was treated as a matter of dosage rather than a reason for prohibition.