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College Pudding, Baked
Blanch and pound four ounces of sweet and half a dozen bitter almonds. Mix them with six table-spoonfuls of sifted sugar, and a quarter of a pound of sweet butter. Beat all well together, then add the yolks of six and the whites of three eggs, and a wine-glassful of brandy. When well beaten, pour the mixture into a pie-dish over a layer, about an inch thick, of apricot or any other jam. Bake in a good oven. If preferred, the dish may be lined with a good puff paste before laying in the jam. Time to bake, one hour and a half. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
The structure of this pudding is straightforward, but one ingredient rules it out. Bitter almonds are not a flavouring substitute for sweet almonds with a stronger taste; they are a source of cyanide.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the enzyme emulsin converts to hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed, wetted or chewed. Blanching and pounding, exactly what the recipe calls for, is what liberates it.
- The dose is not trivially smallEstimates for a single raw bitter almond run to a few milligrams of releasable cyanide, and the figures usually cited suggest a handful of kernels could be dangerous to a child. Half a dozen kernels pounded into a pudding meant for four or five people sits in a range no modern cook should be guessing at.
- Baking does not make it safeHeat drives off some hydrogen cyanide, but an enclosed, moist batter under a layer of jam is not a reliable way to expel it, and no home cook can verify how much remains.
- They are not sold as food anywayUnprocessed bitter almonds cannot legally be sold for eating in the United States, and cyanogenic content in such kernels is restricted in the EU. Products labelled bitter almond on a modern shelf are extracts or flavourings -- either processed to remove the cyanogenic compounds or synthetic.
- Historical context, not a loopholeVictorian cookery books call for bitter almonds routinely, in ratios like this one; prussic acid was known to be the hazard, but it was treated as a matter of degree rather than a prohibition. That tolerance is what has changed.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for a baked almond pudding over jam. Do not attempt to adapt this one by scaling the bitter almonds down.
College puddings are traditionally said to take their name from the Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and are usually described as small, rich, individually served puddings, often fried or steamed; recipes under that name appear in English cookery books from the early eighteenth century onward and vary enormously, from suet-and-currant balls to the almond-and-jam batter here. Cassell's, compiled for Victorian middle-class households, prints several versions and gives each a probable cost, in this case two shillings, a reminder that its readers were budgeting as carefully as they were entertaining. The almond content places this one closer to a rich baked custard or a frangipane tart than to the suet pudding most readers would have pictured, and the alternative of lining the dish with puff paste shows how loosely the line between pudding and tart was drawn. The use of a few bitter almonds among many sweet ones was a common nineteenth-century way of intensifying almond flavour, a practice now largely replaced by commercial extract.