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Almond Pudding, Jewish
Put four ounces of sweet almonds, and three bitter ones, into a saucepan of cold water. Heat it gradually, and when too hot to bear the fingers put the almonds into a basin, slip off the skins, and throw them at once into cold water. Dry them well, and pound them in a mortar until they form a smooth paste; drop a tea-spoonful of cold water over them two or three times to prevent them oiling. Mix with them four ounces of powdered loaf sugar, and add two table-spoonfuls of rose-water, together with the yolks of four, and the whites of three, eggs well beaten. Stir briskly for ten minutes, pour into a well-oiled mould, and bake in a quick oven. Turn the pudding out of the mould before serving, and pour round it a thick syrup, flavoured with the rind and juice of a lemon, and coloured with cochineal. Time, half an hour to bake. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
This is a flourless baked almond pudding of a kind common in Victorian dessert cookery, but it is built on an ingredient that is no longer sold or eaten as food. The notes below explain the problem rather than adapt the method.
- The bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which converts to hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding in a mortar with drops of water does. They are not a stronger version of sweet almonds; they are a different, toxic thing, and the sale of raw bitter almonds is restricted or prohibited in the United States and many other jurisdictions.
- Why three seems small and is not the pointThree nuts in a pudding for four is a low dose and bitter almonds were used routinely in Victorian cookery, but the toxin load varies widely between nuts and the pudding is portioned unevenly. Children are markedly more susceptible, and the recipe makes only three or four helpings.
- Baking does not make it safeHalf an hour in the oven drives off some hydrogen cyanide but does not reliably destroy it, and the almond aroma the dish depends on is the marzipan-scented compound benzaldehyde, produced by the same breakdown. Heat is not a decontamination step here.
- Blanching in hot waterHeating the nuts until the water is too hot for the fingers, then slipping the skins, is standard blanching and perfectly sound practice for sweet almonds. It removes the skin only, and does nothing to the amygdalin in the kernel.
- CochinealThe pink syrup is coloured with cochineal, a dye made from crushed scale insects. It is still permitted as carmine but must be declared, and it is a recognised allergen for a small number of people as well as being unsuitable for vegetarian and most kosher and halal eating.
- If you want the dishA baked almond-and-egg pudding of this type is entirely reproducible from a current recipe using sweet almonds alone, with almond extract if the note is wanted. Use one; do not attempt to scale or substitute your way through the text above.
- Terms in passingLoaf sugar is refined cane sugar broken from a cone and pounded, equivalent to modern caster or granulated. A "quick oven" is a hot one, usually glossed at somewhere around 400-450F, though the book itself gives no temperatures; the tenpence costing is a Victorian household figure, not a modern one.
Cassell's carried a scattering of recipes labelled "Jewish," reflecting both the visible Anglo-Jewish community of Victorian London and the general nineteenth-century appetite for national and regional labels in cookery books. A pudding bound with beaten eggs and ground almonds rather than flour or breadcrumbs is the kind of thing often associated with Passover, when leaven and grain flours are set aside for the week, and versions of it appear across the Sephardi and Ashkenazi dessert repertoires; rose-water as the perfume points to the older Mediterranean and Iberian line of almond cookery, generally traced through medieval Spain. The bitter almonds are not a Jewish feature but a standard English one: until well into the twentieth century it was common for British almond recipes to call for a few bitter kernels to sharpen the flavour of the sweet ones, and ratafia, noyau and almond flavourings were all built on the same principle before the toxicity was regulated out of the domestic kitchen.