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Egg and Brandy Cream
Beat well the yolks of five fresh eggs with a spoonful of cream. Add three ounces of sugar, finely pounded and sifted, and two glasses of the best French brandy. Blanch and pound thirty-four sweet and six bitter almonds, and boil them in a few spoonfuls of milk; add them, when cold, to the eggs, and stir the mixture thoroughly. When it is perfectly mixed, pour it into a well-lined saucepan along with a quart of cream; stir one way till it becomes thick, but do not let it boil. Serve in custard-cups with a ratafia on the top of each. Probable cost, about 4s. 9d. Sufficient for twelve cups.
This is a rich stirred custard of the Victorian dessert-table type, but it is built around six bitter almonds, and that single ingredient puts it out of reach.
- The bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernels are crushed, chewed or steeped in liquid. Pounding six of them and boiling them in milk, as directed here, is precisely the process that liberates the cyanide into the dish.
- Why the quantity mattersPublished estimates for the hydrogen cyanide yield of a raw bitter almond vary, generally in the range of about one to a few milligrams per kernel, and the dose that would harm a child is correspondingly small. The almonds here are boiled briefly in a few spoonfuls of milk, but the custard itself is deliberately kept below boiling, so no assumption should be made that the volatile cyanide has been driven off.
- They are not sold as foodRaw bitter almonds cannot legally be sold for eating in the United States and are restricted across much of Europe. Anything labelled "bitter almond" on a modern shelf is an extract or flavouring, not the kernel this recipe means, and substituting it does not reproduce the recipe as written. If you want an almond-scented brandy custard, work from a current recipe.
- The lining of the saucepan"Well-lined" most likely refers to a tinned copper pan, though the book does not say. Victorian tinning wore through with use and exposed bare copper, which acidic and eggy mixtures attack.
- "Two glasses" is not a measureA wine glass in this period ran roughly two fluid ounces, but the book does not say, and brandy glasses varied widely. The quantity in the original is genuinely ambiguous.
- RatafiaThe ratafia set on top of each cup is a small, hard macaroon-type biscuit, traditionally flavoured with bitter almond or apricot kernel. The same objection applies to period ratafias as to the almonds themselves; modern commercial ratafia biscuits use almond flavouring instead.
- Cost and yield4s. 9d. was a substantial outlay for a dessert, reflecting a quart of cream and two glasses of good French brandy. The twelve custard cups tell you the scale: this was a dinner-party sweet, not a family pudding.
Bitter almonds were a standard flavouring in English confectionery through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, used in tiny numbers alongside sweet almonds to give the sharp marzipan note that plain almonds lack; here the proportion is thirty-four sweet to six bitter. Cooks understood the kernels were potent - old cookery books warn against using too many - but the chemistry was not settled until the nineteenth century, when amygdalin was isolated and the mechanism by which crushed kernels yield hydrogen cyanide became clear. Bitter almonds gradually disappeared from domestic kitchens and were replaced by distilled essences, which carry the flavour without the glycoside - a shift usually attributed to some mixture of that new understanding, commerce and convenience. Cassell's, compiled in the 1870s and reissued for decades, sits on the far side of that shift: a custard enriched with cream and brandy, cooked without letting it boil, and served in individual cups belongs to the same family as syllabubs, posset and the French pot de creme, all of them designed to be handed round after dinner rather than cut at table.