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Almond Pudding, Rich
Blanch and beat to a paste a quarter of a pound of sweet almonds and five or six bitter ones, with a little water to prevent oiling; add a little sugar rubbed on lemon-rind, a piece of butter the size of an egg, melted in a glass of warm cream, five eggs well beaten, a little nutmeg, and a glass of sherry. Put the mixture into a pie-dish and bake in a moderate oven, or put it into buttered cups, and turn out. Serve with sweet sauce. Time to bake, half an hour. Probable cost, 2s. 4d. Sufficient for four persons.
The problem is the five or six bitter almonds, which are not a quaint flavouring but the reason this recipe cannot be reproduced.
- Bitter almonds are the hazardBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what blanching, pounding to a paste and moistening with water accomplishes. The dose in any one pudding is small, but it is uncontrolled and unmeasured, and the margin of safety for a child is much narrower than for an adult.
- Baking does not make it safeHeat drives off some hydrogen cyanide, but a half-hour bake in a wet custard is not a reliable detoxification step, and nothing in the method tells you how much glycoside was in the nuts to begin with. Bitter almonds vary widely in amygdalin content.
- They are not sold as food nowRaw bitter almonds cannot legally be sold for eating in the United States and are restricted in many other countries. Anything a modern shop labels "bitter almond" is almost always a flavouring essence, not the nut, and substituting it does not reconstruct this recipe.
- The rest of the pudding is unremarkableStrip out the bitter almonds and what remains is a baked almond custard of a kind that appears in dozens of Victorian books. If you want the dish, work from a current almond custard or bakewell-style pudding recipe rather than adapting this one.
- What the old prices tell youTwo shillings and fourpence for four people was not a cheap sweet in Cassell's day — the sherry, cream and quarter-pound of almonds all cost money. "Rich" in the title probably points to the ingredient list rather than the texture.
Bitter almonds were a standard flavouring in British and continental kitchens for centuries, used in small numbers precisely because a few of them carry the intense marzipan note that sweet almonds lack. Cookery writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries called for them freely in ratafias, macaroons, blancmanges and puddings of this sort, and the same compound — benzaldehyde — is what almond extract now supplies, generally without the accompanying cyanogenic glycoside. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for the middle-class households of late Victorian Britain, treats the bitter almond as an ordinary grocery item, and the recipe's "a little water to prevent oiling" is a real technical instruction of the period: pounding almonds dry in a mortar breaks the cells and turns the paste greasy, so a little liquid was commonly added to keep it smooth. The cost in shillings and pence, given for most entries in the book, appears to have been aimed at the housekeeper planning against a weekly budget rather than the cook at the stove.