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ALMOND SYRUP (or ORGEAT)
Blanch and pound three ounces of sweet and four or five bitter almonds thoroughly, adding a little rose-water to prevent oiling. Add gradually one quart of milk and water, and sugar to taste. Boil and strain it, when it will be ready for use. It is a nice flavouring for sauces, puddings, creams, etc., and also makes a beneficial drink for persons affected with chest-complaints. Time, quarter of an hour. Sufficient for one quart. Probable cost, 9d.
This is a Victorian flavouring syrup built on bitter almonds, which is the reason it cannot be reproduced as printed. The notes below explain the specific problem and the archaic terms in the text.
- Bitter almonds are the hazardBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted action this recipe requires in the pounding step. Raw bitter almonds are not sold as food in the United States and are restricted in many other countries for exactly this reason.
- The dose is not controlledAmygdalin content varies from nut to nut and from crop to crop, so "four or five bitter almonds" is not a measurable quantity of an active toxin. Boiling drives off some of the cyanide, since it is volatile, but a quarter of an hour's boiling in an open pan cannot be relied on to remove all of what was liberated in the mortar, and straining removes none of it.
- Bitter almond flavouring is not a substituteModern bottled bitter almond flavouring and commercial orgeat syrup are made with benzaldehyde or with sweet almonds and are formulated to be free of cyanogenic compounds. They are not the same material the recipe calls for, and this recipe should not be treated as a route to them. Use a current orgeat recipe instead.
- "Milk and water"A period shorthand for the two mixed together; the proportion is not given here, though roughly equal parts was the usual reading. Either way the total is one quart of thin liquid, a thrift measure as much as a culinary one.
- Rose-water and "oiling"Pounded almonds release oil and turn to paste; a little liquid keeps the mass from separating so it stays a smooth meal. This part of the technique is sound, and adding liquid while grinding is still the practice when almond milk is made by hand from sweet almonds.
- The medical claimThe line about chest complaints reflects the nineteenth-century belief that almond emulsions soothed coughs, and bitter almond preparations were dosed as sedatives in exactly the era this book was written. That is pharmacology, not cookery, and it has been abandoned.
- Cost and yield9d is ninepence in pre-decimal currency; the quart yield is stated in the text.
Orgeat takes its name, through French orge, from the Latin hordeum, barley: the original medieval and early modern drink was a barley water, and almonds were added later until they displaced the grain entirely, leaving a French word for barley attached to an almond syrup. By the later nineteenth century orgeat sat in the awkward space this entry occupies -- a kitchen flavouring for creams and puddings, a cooling drink, and a mild domestic medicine all at once. A small proportion of bitter almonds to sweet is common in period recipes as a way of intensifying almond flavour, since the compound responsible for the characteristic "almond" taste is more abundant in the bitter nut; the same logic survives today in almond extract, made instead from synthesised or fruit-stone-derived benzaldehyde. Orgeat later found a second life far from the sickroom, as the almond syrup in mid-twentieth-century tiki drinks, where most drinkers now meet it.