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Brighton Rock
Blanch and pound to a paste three ounces of sweet and one of bitter almonds, using a little rose-water to moisten. Add four ounces of clean currants, and mix one pound of dry flour with half a pound of sifted loaf sugar and the almond paste. Stir into this half a pound of fresh butter beaten to a cream, and mix all well together. The cakes may be baked in small pans or dropped in lumps on floured tins, and cooked for ten or fifteen minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
This is a Regency-style almond cake rather than the seaside sugar stick of the same name, and it cannot be made as printed: one of its four listed flavourings is a genuinely toxic kernel.
- Bitter almonds are the problemAn ounce of bitter almonds is roughly 25 to 30 kernels. They contain amygdalin, which enzymes in the crushed kernel convert to hydrogen cyanide the moment the paste is moistened and pounded — precisely the step the recipe calls for.
- Baking does not make them safeBaking is not a reliable fix -- some hydrogen cyanide is volatile and will be lost in the oven, but ten to fifteen minutes in a cake batter cannot be relied on to remove it. An ounce of kernels is a substantial amount of amygdalin, and it is divided between a small number of little cakes, so any one cake may carry a disproportionate dose.
- They are no longer a grocery itemThey are no longer an ordinary grocery item -- raw bitter almond kernels are restricted or unavailable at retail in the UK, the US and the EU, which set limits on hydrogen cyanide in such products. What is sold instead is bitter almond flavouring or extract, usually based on benzaldehyde and free of the cyanogenic compounds, and it is not a substitute in a recipe that treats the kernels as bulk paste.
- Apricot and peach kernels are not a workaroundThe kernels sometimes sold as "bitter apricot seeds" carry the same amygdalin, often at higher levels, and are the subject of standing food-safety warnings. Substituting them repeats the hazard rather than avoiding it.
- What to do insteadUse a current almond cake or Shrewsbury-style biscuit recipe. The rest of the formula here — sweet almonds, currants, sugar, flour, creamed butter — is unremarkable and well covered by modern published versions.
- A note on the old measures, for reading only"loaf sugar" is sugar broken from a refined cone and then sifted; "dry flour" means flour kept or dried before use, a real concern in a damp Victorian larder. The stated cost is 1s. 6d.
This belongs to the family of rich, unleavened almond-and-currant cakes that English cookery books carried through the nineteenth century, cousins to Shrewsbury cakes and the various "rocks" and "rock buns" whose name is often said to refer to the rough, lumpy shape dropped on the tin rather than to anything hard or boiled. The seaside stick of peppermint rock that most readers now associate with Brighton is a separate and largely later trade, and the two shared shelf space in print without sharing a method. Bitter almonds appear here as an ordinary flavouring: before commercial benzaldehyde extract became cheap and widespread, cooks got their marzipan note from the kernels themselves, and Victorian recipes routinely specify a ratio of sweet to bitter almonds in just this way. Their toxicity was known erereported deaths from bitter almond preparations — but the risk was treated as a matter of dosage and habit rather than a reason to leave them out, which is why so many otherwise reliable period recipes now carry a warning.