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Almonds, to Blanch
Put some almonds with a little cold water upon the fire, and let them remain until the water is hot, but not boiling. Drain them and draw the skins off, placing them immediately in cold water, to preserve the colour.
A short preparatory technique that still works exactly as written; the only things worth adding are the reasons behind each step and the small refinements modern practice has settled on.
- Heat, not boilThe water only needs to be hot enough to loosen the skin from the kernel, short of a boil; the recipe gives no temperature. Prolonged boiling waterlogs the nut and softens it, which matters if the almonds are destined for pounding into paste or slicing thin.
- TimingOnce the water is hot, a minute or so is usually enough. Cassell gives no time; the practical cue is the skin, which should slide when the nut is pinched between finger and thumb.
- Why the cold waterThe rinse stops residual heat cooking the nut and keeps the kernel white, which is the reason the recipe itself gives. Almonds left warm and wet may discolour at the surface and will spoil if stored damp.
- Drying before useThe book stops at the cold water, but blanched almonds must be spread on a cloth or a low tray and dried before they are ground, or the resulting paste will be gummy. A very low oven, around 200F with the door ajar, dries them without colouring.
- BuyingThis works only on raw almonds with the brown seed coat intact. Roasted or already-blanched supermarket almonds will not shed anything, and the technique is wasted on them.
- Bitter almondsOlder cookery books frequently call for a proportion of bitter almonds alongside sweet ones for flavour. Bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide, and are not sold for eating in most countries today; almond extract is the modern substitute.
Blanching almonds is one of the oldest routine tasks in a European kitchen: medieval and early modern cookery leaned on almond milk and pounded almonds as heavily as later cooks leaned on cream, partly because almond milk kept better than dairy and partly because it was permissible on fast days when milk and butter were not. By the time Cassell's compiled its dictionary in the later nineteenth century, the almond had settled into the confectioner's and pastry cook's domain -- ratafias, macaroons, marzipan, blancmange -- and every one of those preparations begins with removing the skin, which is bitter, gritty and would speckle a white sweetmeat.