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Apricot Pie
Pare, stone, and halve the apricots. Place them in a pie-dish, piling them high in the middle. Strew over them a little sifted sugar, and a few of the kernels blanched and chopped small. Cover them with a good light crust, and bake in a moderate oven. Time to bake, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 2s. for a moderate-sized dish. Sufficient for four or five persons.
The fruit and pastry are unremarkable, but one instruction puts this pie outside what can be recommended today.
- The kernels are the problemApricot stones contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed, chewed or wetted, and chopping the kernels through the fruit is what makes that release possible. Blanching is a brief scald that may partly deactivate the enzyme rather than trigger it, but the three-quarters of an hour in the oven cannot be relied on to clear cyanide from fragments buried under fruit and crust.
- Quantity is unmeasured"A few of the kernels" gives no weight or count. European food-safety assessments put the tolerable intake for an adult at the level of a very small number of kernels in a day, and lower for children; a dish shared among four or five people with an unspecified handful stirred through it cannot be brought inside that range by guesswork.
- Bitter and sweet kernels are not distinguishable in the kitchenKernels vary -- Amygdalin content varies enormously between cultivars and between individual stones. Marked bitterness is a rough indicator of a high-amygdalin kernel, but it gives no measure of the dose, and cookery books of this period called for kernels as an almond flavouring without any means of knowing it.
- Use a current recipeAn apricot pie is worth making, but follow a modern recipe rather than adapting this one.
- Reading the rest of the entryA Victorian "pie-dish" was generally a deep oval or oblong baking dish, and mounding the fruit is the usual way of keeping a pastry lid from sinking as the fruit softens, though the book does not explain the instruction. "Probable cost, 2s." is a nineteenth-century shilling price, useful only as a marker of how the book priced a dish for a household budget.
Cassell's belongs to the great run of late nineteenth-century British household dictionaries, and its fruit pies follow a fixed formula: prepare the fruit, sugar it, cover with "a good light crust", bake. The instruction to blanch and chop a few of the kernels may reflect a long-standing economy of the period, in which the stones of apricots, peaches and cherries supplied the almond note that expensive bitter almonds or ratafia essence would otherwise provide; recipes for ratafia biscuits, noyau and macaroons of the same era draw on the same source. Apricots themselves were still a luxury in Britain, largely trained against south-facing walls in kitchen gardens or imported from France. The book prints a probable cost for its recipes as a matter of standard format, cheap or expensive. The pharmacological objection to kernels was not unknown at the time -- nineteenth-century toxicology texts discussed prussic acid in bitter almonds and stone fruit at length -- but cookery writers treated the quantities in flavouring as negligible, a judgement that later dose-based assessment has not upheld.