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Almonds, Croquettes Of
Blanch and pound a quarter of a pound of sweet and seven or eight bitter almonds with three table-spoonfuls of sifted sugar, the white of an egg, and a glass of sherry or raisin wine. Crumble a quarter of a pound of sponge-cake and add it to the mixture, with the frothed whites of three more eggs. Beat it into a solid paste, and mould it into balls about the size of a small orange. Dip them first into egg, then bread-crumbs, then sugar; fry them a few minutes in boiling butter or oil; drain and serve. Time to fry, six minutes. Probable cost, 1s.
This is a Victorian sweet fritter that depends on bitter almonds for its flavour, and that single ingredient puts it outside what can be made in a modern kitchen.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding them with egg white and wine does. Seven or eight raw bitter almonds go into the batch, and while the dose per croquette is not something the recipe lets you calculate, it is not a risk worth running; children are far more susceptible than adults.
- Frying does not fix itSix minutes in hot fat cannot be relied on to drive off or destroy the hydrogen cyanide at the centre of a dense paste ball. Brief cooking is not a safeguard here.
- They are not sold for eatingBitter almonds are restricted or banned for retail sale as food in the United States and much of Europe. Where they survive commercially it is as a source of distilled almond flavouring, processed under controlled conditions.
- Almond extract is not a substitute hereModern almond extract supplies the benzaldehyde note that bitter almonds gave, but the quantity relationship is not something to guess at in a recipe built around eight whole nuts. Use a current recipe for almond croquettes or beignets instead.
- For reading only: the unitsA "glass" of sherry is generally taken as a wineglassful, conventionally about 2 fluid ounces. "Probable cost, 1s" is one shilling; the book gives a probable cost for its dishes as a matter of course.
- For reading only: boiling butter"Boiling butter" means butter heated to frying temperature; plain butter browns and burns well before deep-frying heat. The recipe also permits oil.
Bitter almonds were a standard flavouring in nineteenth-century English confectionery, used in ratafias, macaroons, blancmanges and puddings wherever a sharp almond perfume was wanted, and cookery writers of the period treated a handful of them as an ordinary seasoning rather than a hazard. Cassell's places this among its almond entries in the dictionary's alphabetical sweep, alongside almond soup, almond paste and almond cheesecakes. The croquette form — a stiff paste bound with egg and sponge-cake crumb, egged, crumbed and deep-fried — belongs to the same French-influenced repertoire that produced savoury croquettes of chicken and rice, adapted to the sweet course. The dangers of amygdalin were understood by chemists well before this book appeared, but regulation of bitter almonds as a food came considerably later, which is why recipes like this circulated freely in print for decades.