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BUTTER (a I'Espagnol)
Put half an ounce of isinglass, one glassful of rose-water, and six bitter almonds, blanched and sliced, into an enamelled saucepan, and let it stand near the fire for an hour, or until the isinglass is dissolved and the flavour extracted from the almonds. Add, by degrees and very carefully, half a pint of cream mixed with the yolks of three well-beaten eggs. Sweeten to taste, and stir it well over a slow fire until it thickens. Remove it from the fire, and continue to stir until nearly cold, and put it into a mould well wetted with rose-water. Time to thicken, about ten minutes. Probable cost for one pint mould, 2s.
This is a moulded rose-water cream in the style of an Old English "butter" — a rich set custard rather than anything churned. It cannot be made as written, because its flavouring is a controlled toxin.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds (the kernels of Prunus amygdalus var. amara) contain amygdalin, which the nut's own enzyme converts to hydrogen cyanide once the kernel is crushed, sliced or wetted. Slicing six of them and steeping them warm in rose-water for an hour is precisely the procedure that liberates that cyanide into the liquid you then eat.
- The quantity is not trivialBitter almond kernels typically carry several milligrams of cyanide-equivalent each, and this recipe puts the whole extraction into a single pint mould intended to be shared. The gentle thickening over a slow fire cannot be relied on to drive it off.
- You will not find them for sale anywayYou will not find them easily anyway -- Raw bitter almonds are not legally sold for eating in the United States, and their cyanogenic content is regulated in the UK and EU. Most modern 'bitter almond flavour' on the shelf is benzaldehyde-based and is not what the recipe is calling for.
- IsinglassThe half ounce of isinglass is a collagen setting agent made from the swim bladders of fish, once the standard clear jelly for creams. It is now largely a brewing and conservation material rather than a kitchen staple, and it does not swap gram-for-gram with modern gelatine.
- Units and costHalf a pint of cream is an Imperial half-pint, about 285 ml, and one 'glassful' of rose-water is unfixed — the book does not say what it means. The '2s.' is the estimated late-Victorian cost of the ingredients, not a measure of anything.
- If you want the dishA rose-water cream set in a mould is a perfectly good thing to eat. Use a current recipe for a moulded custard cream with rose-water and, if you want the almond note, sweet almonds or a commercial flavouring.
Cassell's places this among the sweet "butters" — old English confections in which the word means a thick, spreadable or moulded richness rather than anything from a churn, as in the surviving orange butter and lemon butter of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rose water and bitter almonds belong to a long tradition of sweet-kitchen flavourings, where rose water and almond milk did much of the work that vanilla and cream do now; by the 1880s rose water was still stocked by the chemist. Bitter almonds were then an unremarkable household flavouring, used a few at a time for that marzipan-and-cherry note in blancmanges, ratafias and custards — the toxicology of amygdalin was understood in the period, but the assumption was that the small domestic doses in a shared mould were harmless, an assumption modern food regulators do not share.