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Apricot Pudding, Baked
Peel, stone, and halve a dozen fresh ripe apricots: place them in a saucepan with a glassful of white wine, and let them simmer very gently for a quarter of an hour. Take them from the fire, and add four of the kernels blanched and pounded, and two table-spoonfuls of sifted sugar. Beat them with a fork; then mix with them four sponge-cakes crumbled, a breakfast-cupful of new milk, and three eggs well beaten. Pour the mixture into a welloiled mould, and bake immediately. This pudding may be eaten hot or cold. It cold, turn it out into a glass dish, and pour round it a good custard. Time to bake, forty minutes. Sufficient for six persons. Probable cost, 1s. 10d., with apricots 1d. each.
The pudding itself is a straightforward baked custard thickened with sponge cake, but the flavouring makes it unsuitable to reproduce. A current apricot pudding recipe should be used instead.
- The kernels are the problemApricot kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and wetted — exactly what "blanched and pounded" then stirred into milk and eggs achieves. They were used in the nineteenth century as a stand-in for bitter almond flavouring, and the same chemistry is why the sale of bitter almonds for eating is now restricted or prohibited in many countries.
- Why four is not a safe numberEuropean food-safety assessments put the acute reference dose for cyanide at a level that a single bitter kernel can approach in an adult and exceed in a child. Four kernels in a dish divided unevenly between six people, with no way to know the amygdalin content of a particular variety, is not a quantity that can be judged in a domestic kitchen. Baking drives off some hydrogen cyanide but not reliably or measurably.
- Sweet almond is not the same thingThe kernels are only a flavouring -- Nothing about the pudding's texture or set depends on them; they were there purely for the marzipan note.
- Reading the rest of the pageFor interest rather than use: a glassful here means a wine glass, roughly 2 fl oz; a breakfast-cupful is about half a pint (some 8–10 fl oz); sifted sugar is sifted fine sugar, not modern granulated; and new milk means fresh whole milk, unhomogenised and unskimmed. The oiled mould is a plain metal or china pudding mould, baked in the oven rather than steamed.
- Cost note1s. 10d. total, with apricots reckoned at a penny each; fresh apricots had a short season in Britain and were scarce outside it.
Cassell's belongs to the great late-Victorian run of encyclopaedic household dictionaries, and its fruit puddings follow a formula visible across the period: soft fruit stewed in a little wine, sweetened, bound with crumbled sponge cake or breadcrumbs, and set with eggs and milk into something between a custard and a pudding. The kernel trick is older than the book — recipes from the eighteenth century onward call for a few stone kernels to be pounded into apricot, peach or cherry dishes on the reasoning that the fruit's own stone carries its truest flavour, and the practice is generally traced to that habit rather than to any particular cook. Almond essence — first distilled from bitter almonds, later made with synthetic benzaldehyde — made the kernels unnecessary, and food-safety guidance on cyanogenic glycosides eventually made them unacceptable, so the instruction survives mainly as a marker of how confidently Victorian cookery used ingredients whose chemistry it did not know. The alternative serving — turned out cold into a glass dish with custard poured round it — is worth noting as period presentation: a moulded pudding sitting in a pool of sauce, visible through cut glass, was the cheap dinner-party version of an ice or a charlotte.