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Chester Pudding
Whisk the yolks of two eggs, and mix them with a table-spoonful of finely-sifted sugar, half a dozen sweet and half a dozen bitter almonds, blanched and pounded, the finely-minced rind and juice of half a lemon, and a piece of butter about the size of an egg. Stir these over a moderate fire for a few minutes, then pour the mixture into a small buttered pie-dish lined with good puff paste. Put it into the oven, and, while it is baking, whisk the unused whites of the eggs to a firm froth. When the pudding is very nearly ready, cover it with the froth, sift sugar thickly over it, and stiffen it a few minutes in the oven. Time to bake, twenty minutes; five minutes to set the white of egg. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for one person.
This is a small lemon-and-almond curd tart under a meringue lid, and it reads harmlessly enough until you reach the almonds. Read it as a document rather than as instructions.
- The bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding and mixing with lemon juice does. Half a dozen of them is a meaningful dose in a pudding the book itself says is "sufficient for one person."
- Cooking does not fix itBlanching and a twenty-minute bake do not reliably drive off the cyanide already liberated in the paste, and the custard is stirred and enclosed rather than boiled open. Victorian cooks used bitter almonds as a flavouring precisely because they are pungent; the flavour compound and the toxin are both released from the same precursor when the nut is crushed and wetted.
- Availability todayRaw bitter almonds are not sold for eating in the United States and are restricted in many other countries, so the ingredient list cannot be filled as written in any case. Anyone wanting a lemon-almond meringue pudding should work from a current recipe.
- Reading the quantitiesFor context rather than for use: "a piece of butter about the size of an egg" is conventionally read as about 2 oz, and "finely-sifted sugar" means sugar pounded and passed through a sieve — nearest to caster or superfine today, rather than modern confectioners' sugar, which contains starch.
- "Probable cost, 8d."Eightpence in pre-decimal currency. Cassell's attached a probable cost to most of its entries. It is a useful reminder that this was a single-portion dish, not a family one.
Chester pudding belongs to a small family of Victorian named puddings — Manchester, Newcastle, Chester — several of which are rich lemon or almond mixtures baked in a puff-paste case and finished with a sweetened egg-white froth, in the manner of the later meringue-topped lemon tart. The connection between the names and the towns is not established by anything firmer than repetition from one nineteenth-century compiler to the next. What is characteristic of the period is the almond flavouring: before commercial benzaldehyde essence became cheap and widespread, the strong marzipan note in English baking came from bitter almonds or from the kernels of apricots and peaches, pounded a few at a time into a larger quantity of sweet almonds. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, an enormous alphabetical compendium aimed at middle-class households with a cook, prints the practice without comment because it was ordinary; regulation of bitter almonds as a food came much later.