Home › The Principles of Cookery › Gloucester Puddings
Gloucester Puddings
Take three eggs, and their weight in equal quantities of butter and flour; mix thoroughly, and add twelve bitter almonds, blanched and pounded, and a quarter of a pound of sifted loaf sugar. Beat well together to a light batter. Half fill some cups with the mixture, bake, turn out, and serve with wine sauce. Time to bake, half an hour. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for four persons.
This is a small baked sponge-style pudding of the weight-of-eggs school, but it is flavoured with twelve pounded bitter almonds, and that is a quantity that puts it out of reach. The notes below explain the reading of the recipe and why it should not be attempted.
- The bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding and mixing into a batter does. Twelve almonds shared between four people works out at about three each, which is unlikely to be lethal to an adult but is enough to be a genuine hazard, particularly for children; baking is not a reliable way to remove the cyanide.
- Why Victorian cooks used them anywayBitter almonds were the standard source of almond flavour before commercial extracts were common, and books of this period call for them by the dozen without comment. Sale of unprocessed bitter almonds to the public is now restricted or prohibited in a number of countries, including the United States, for this reason.
- Not the same as almond extractModern almond essence is either synthetic benzaldehyde or benzaldehyde distilled from bitter almond oil with the cyanide removed. It is not a measured swap for whole pounded nuts, and treating this recipe as though it were misses the point of the hazard. Use a current pudding recipe if you want the flavour.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up as needed; "sifted" means crushed and passed through a sieve. The nearest modern equivalent is caster or granulated sugar.
- Weight in eggsThe recipe does not say whether the eggs are weighed in or out of the shell; three eggs in their shells come to roughly 6 oz, which would make the butter and flour about 6 oz each. The quarter pound of sugar is light against that quantity of fat and flour, so this is not quite the equal-weights pound-cake ratio.
- The cups"Some cups" means teacups or small china moulds, half filled so the batter can rise. Turning out and serving with wine sauce — a sweetened sauce thickened and flavoured with sherry or Madeira — was usual for baked puddings of this class.
- Probable costCassell's prints a "probable cost" with its recipes; eightpence for a pudding serving four is a modest sum.
Cassell's assigns dozens of puddings to English counties and towns, and it is often said that such names record where a version was written down rather than any documented local invention; Gloucester puddings belong to that pattern rather than to any traceable Gloucestershire tradition. The recipe itself is a weight-of-eggs batter, the method by which a cook with a balance but no standard measures could scale a sponge to whatever eggs were in the basket — the same arithmetic behind pound cake and Victoria sponge. What dates it most sharply is the almond flavouring: through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries bitter almonds, along with ratafia biscuits and peach kernels, were how kitchens got that flavour into custards, ratafias and puddings, and cookery books called for them in tens and dozens. Concern about their toxicity grew through the later nineteenth century, and the rise of manufactured essences gradually pushed recipes like this one out of use.