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ICED PUDDING (another way)
Beat up eight eggs, and add to them twelve ounces of good sugar and a pint and a half of new milk. Pound together in a mortar sweet and bitter almonds, half a pound of the former and two ounces of the latter, which should be blanched, and dried in a clean cloth, then pounded, and put with the other ingredients into a well-lined saucepan. Stir, and let the pudding thicken, but do not let it boil. Strain and put it into the freezing-pot for half an hour, when it should be transferred to an ice-pudding mould, and kept in the ice until required for use. Serve turned out, with a compote of fruit in the dish, and some over the top of the pudding. A gill of Curacoa, maraschino, or any other liqueur will improve the pudding.
This is a frozen almond custard of a familiar Victorian type, but it is built on two ounces of bitter almonds, and that quantity is the reason the recipe cannot be followed. The notes below explain the hazard and decode the rest of the period language.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are crushed and moistened — exactly what pounding them in a mortar and stirring them into warm milk does. Two ounces is a large dose by any measure, and the custard is deliberately never boiled, so nothing drives off what is formed. Raw bitter almonds are not sold for eating in the United States and are restricted elsewhere for this reason.
- The custard is also never brought to temperatureThe custard is loosely specified -- Eight eggs in a pint and a half of milk, thickened but expressly kept below boiling, then chilled and held on ice for an unspecified period. No temperature or holding time is given, so how far the egg is actually cooked is left to the cook's judgement. If you want a frozen almond custard, use a current recipe with a cooked base and a stated temperature.
- A gillA quarter of a pint, about five imperial fluid ounces or 140 ml -- the measure given for the optional liqueur.
- New milkSimply fresh, unskimmed milk straight from the day's supply, as opposed to milk that had stood and been skimmed. Whole milk is the modern equivalent.
- The freezing-potA pewter or tin canister set in a tub of crushed ice and salt, scraped down by hand with a spaddle. Half an hour in it produces a soft-frozen mixture, which is why the pudding is then packed into a mould and buried in ice to set hard.
- Well-lined saucepanA copper pan freshly tinned inside. The instruction is about avoiding contact between acid or egg and bare copper, a real concern in a Victorian kitchen and not one in a modern stainless or enamelled pan.
- ServingTurned out of the mould onto a dish with a fruit compote spooned around and over it. The quantities suggest something in the region of eight to ten servings.
History: Iced puddings -- frozen creams and custards packed into shaped pewter moulds and buried in ice until service -- were a set piece of the nineteenth-century dinner table, and the '(another way)' of the title indicates the book carried more than one version. The bitter almond was the period's standard source of that marzipan-and-cherry flavour now supplied by almond extract or benzaldehyde, and period recipes commonly blend a small proportion of bitter almonds into a larger weight of sweet ones, as the half-pound to two ounces here does. The toxicity of amygdalin was already understood in the nineteenth century, and prussic acid poisoning from almond flavourings appears in Victorian medical literature, but the risk was treated as a matter of moderation rather than prohibition. Regulation came later, and it is why this recipe reads as a period document rather than a set of instructions.