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German Puffs, Almond
Blanch and pound one ounce of sweet, and two of bitter almonds, with a little orange-flower or rose-water; add four table-spoonfuls of new milk, and a dessert-spoonful of flour, smoothly mixed with another table-spoonful of milk, the yolks of three and the whites of two eggs, a tiny pinch of salt, and a table-spoonful of sugar. Beat thoroughly. Butter some cups, rather more than half fill them, and bake in a quick oven. Serve as hot as possible, with wine or sweet sauce. Time to bake, a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for four cups.
This is a small baked almond custard, and the almond proportions are the problem: it calls for twice as much bitter almond as sweet.
- Bitter almonds are the hingeBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted y pounding them with rose-water is exactly the condition that sets that reaction going. Sweet almonds contain only traces; bitter almonds contain enough to matter.
- The quantity is out of rangeTwo ounces of bitter almonds is on the order of forty nuts, divided between four small cups. Published figures for a dangerous adult dose sit in the same order of magnitude, and a child's is far lower. This is not a trace flavouring.
- Baking does not make it safeFifteen minutes in a hot oven inside a moist egg custard is not a reliable way to drive off hydrogen cyanide or destroy the glycoside. Heat treatment of bitter almonds is an industrial process with controlled conditions, not something a domestic bake achieves.
- You will not find the ingredient anywaySale of bitter almonds for eating is prohibited or tightly restricted in the United States and much of Europe. What is sold as "bitter almond" flavouring today is benzaldehyde, either synthetic or purified, with the cyanogenic compounds removed y a different substance entirely.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for a baked almond custard or pudding. Do not attempt to rescale the bitter almonds in this one.
- Reading the rest of itFor context only: "a quick oven" is usually glossed at somewhere around 400-450F, though Victorian oven terms were not standardised; a dessert-spoonful is roughly two teaspoons, and "new milk" is simply fresh whole milk. The yield is four cups, served straight from the oven.
Cassell's is writing at a point when bitter almonds were an ordinary grocer's item, sold alongside sweet ones and used wherever a strong marzipan or ratafia note was wanted -- in macaroons, ratafia biscuits, blancmanges and puddings of exactly this kind. Nineteenth-century cookery and medical writing acknowledged that bitter almonds were potent and sometimes warned against excess, and the proportions in printed recipes vary wildly; two parts bitter to one part sweet is at the strong end even by the standards of the day. Cases of poisoning, generally from almond flavouring essences rather than the nuts, appear in Victorian medical journals, and the gradual regulation of bitter almond sale through the twentieth century is what turned a common baking ingredient into a controlled one.