Home › The Principles of Cookery › Honey Noyau, for Flavouring
Honey Noyau, for Flavouring
Blanch and pound an ounce of sweet almonds and two ounces of bitter almonds; mix with them a pound of sifted sugar, and pour over them two pints of gin mixed with half a pint of milk, which has been boiled with a large table-spoonful of honey, and allowed to cool. Add the thin rind and strained juice of a large lemon, and pour all into a good-sized bottle. Shake the mixture frequently. In twelve days it will be ready for use. Filter through blotting-paper, and keep in bottles securely corked. Probable cost, 1s., exclusive of the gin. Sufficient for a little more than three pints of flavouring.
This is a noyau — an almond-flavoured cordial — and its flavour comes almost entirely from bitter almonds, which is precisely the problem.
- Bitter almonds and cyanideBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which converts to hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and moistened. Two ounces of pounded bitter almonds steeped in liquid for twelve days is a substantial extraction, and nothing in the method destroys the cyanide.
- No heat stepCommercial almond flavouring is made from bitter almond oil that has been steam-distilled and washed to remove hydrogen cyanide. Cold maceration in gin does no such thing: the soluble breakdown products simply pass into the finished cordial.
- The dose is unpredictableAmygdalin content varies widely between nuts and harvests, so there is no way to know the strength of any given batch. A flavouring is also used by the spoonful into other dishes, which spreads an unknown quantity across an unknown number of servings.
- Filtering does nothingStraining through blotting-paper removes almond solids and cloud. It does not remove anything dissolved in the spirit, so the clear, bright result gives a false impression of purity.
- Sale is restrictedUnprocessed bitter almonds cannot legally be sold for food in the United States and are restricted in the UK and EU. If a supplier offers them, that is a reason for suspicion rather than reassurance.
- If you want the flavourUse a current recipe for a bottled almond extract or a commercial crème de noyaux. Sweet almonds alone will not reproduce the character, which is the whole reason the original called for the bitter kind.
Noyau is simply the French for the stone or kernel of a fruit, and the cordials that carry the name were built on the kernels of peaches, apricots and cherries, or on bitter almonds, which share the same marzipan-and-marzipan-adjacent aroma. Such liqueurs were a fixture of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century still-room, where the housekeeper distilled and infused her own waters, ratafias and flavourings rather than buying them; Cassell's, published for a late-Victorian middle-class household, is preserving that tradition just as bottled extracts were beginning to replace it. The honey and milk here are unusual — the milk may be acting as a clarifier, curdling around the almond solids so the mixture filters bright — and the twelve-day steep and blotting-paper filtration are the domestic version of what a liqueur house would do with a still. The danger in bitter almonds was known in period; prussic acid was a recognised poison and a recognised medicine.<br/><br/>The chemistry that makes the flavour is the chemistry that makes the hazard.<br/><br/>That is why modern almond extract is a distilled product rather than an infusion.<br/><br/>The name survives today mostly in crème de noyaux, the pink liqueur that gives an old-style Pink Squirrel its colour.