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Gingerbread, Almond
Mix one ounce of ground ginger with a quarter of a pound of ground rice, and three quarters of a pound of best flour. Put into a jar one pound of treacle, half a pound of sugar, half a pound of fresh butter, the thinly-peeled rind of two lemons, cut into thin slices, and six ounces of sweet almonds, with four or five bitter ones, pounded in a mortar, with a few drops of water, to prevent oiling. Place the jar near the fire, and when the butter is melted, pour all into the flour, etc. Beat till quite light, and bake in a quick oven, on a buttered tin for thirty minutes, if made in small cakes. Probable cost 1s. 8d. for this quantity.
This is a treacle gingerbread enriched with ground almonds, and it reads as a workable Victorian bake until you reach the bitter almonds. Those cannot be used, and the recipe should not be attempted in this form.
- Bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what the recipe instructs when it says to pound them with a few drops of water. Their sale as food is prohibited in the United States and restricted elsewhere, and there is no way to judge a safe dose in a domestic kitchen. Use a current gingerbread recipe instead.
- Why the book calls for themBitter almonds were a common source of almond flavour before synthetic benzaldehyde essence became widely available, and period recipes frequently call for a few bitter almonds among a larger quantity of sweet ones for aroma. That instruction is the reason this page cannot be followed as written.
- Treacle, for referenceTreacle here means British black treacle, closer to blackstrap molasses than to golden syrup; it is what gives this style of gingerbread its dark colour and slight bitterness.
- Ground riceGround rice is a granular rice flour, coarser than the fine rice flour sold for Asian cooking and roughly comparable to semolina in texture. In gingerbread it contributes a drier, shorter crumb.
- "A quick oven"A quick oven in Victorian usage is generally reckoned at somewhere around 400-450F; the book itself gives no temperature. The thirty-minute bake is specified only for small cakes.
- The jar by the fireThe jar is simply a heatproof vessel set in the residual warmth at the hearth to melt butter into treacle and sugar without cooking them — a very low, slow warming rather than a boil.
- Cost note1s. 8d. covers roughly three pounds of mixture, at a period when butter and almonds were the costly items and the ounce of ginger comparatively cheap.
Treacle gingerbread of this kind sat between confectionery and baking in Victorian households: firm enough to cut into small cakes for a tin, sweet enough to serve with tea, and cheap enough that gingerbread stalls were fixtures at English fairs well into the nineteenth century. The almond version is the genteel end of that tradition, where pounded almonds carried both richness and flavour. Period recipes commonly point sweet almonds with a few bitter ones, bitter almond being the concentrated almond aroma then available; commercial almond essence, later made from benzaldehyde, eventually displaced it in domestic recipes. Ground rice appears in a good many Cassell's cakes, where it produced a drier, shorter crumb.