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Irish Seed Cake
Beat nine eggs, yolks and whites, until they are light, and turn eight ounces of fresh butter to a cream, adding by degrees a little rose-water until a quarter of a pint has been used. Mix with the butter a pound of finely-powdered sugar, and add the beaten eggs. Beat the mixture, and dredge into it three-quarters of a pound of well-dried flour and nearly a quarter of a pound of rice flour. Flavour with essence of any kind liked, and scatter in an ounce of caraway-seeds and some pounded bitter almonds. Bake in a quick oven. The baking-tin should be lined with paper, and both tin and paper must be well buttered. Time, an hour and a half to bake. Probable cost, 2s. 4d.
This cake cannot be made as printed. The problem is a single ingredient: "some pounded bitter almonds."
- Bitter almonds are the hingeBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the almond's own enzymes convert to hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding and mixing into a batter does. Sweet almonds, the ones sold today, contain only traces; bitter almonds contain enough that a modest handful is a genuine poisoning risk to a child.
- The quantity is unstated"Some" gives no dose at all, and the toxic and merely flavouring quantities of bitter almond are not far apart. There is no way to scale or judge the instruction as written.
- Baking does not fix itHeat drives off some hydrogen cyanide and destroys the enzyme, but a high-moisture batter baked an hour and a half may retain an unpredictable amount. Cooking is not a reliable safeguard here, and bitter almond kernels are now restricted or unavailable for retail sale in the UK, EU and US.
- "Essence of any kind liked" is a separate ingredientModern bitter-almond essence and almond extract are made from benzaldehyde, either synthetic or cyanide-stripped, and are not the same thing as the pounded kernels the recipe also calls for. The recipe wants both; only one of them is still a food.
- What to do insteadUse a current seed cake recipe. The Victorian structure — creamed butter, whole eggs beaten light, a proportion of rice flour for a drier, shorter crumb, caraway for flavour — survives in print in forms that leave the kernels out.
Seed cake — a plain rich cake scented with caraway — was a fixture of British and Irish baking from the seventeenth century onwards, associated with sowing time and with the tea table, and caraway was cheap and keepable in a way that dried fruit and citrus peel were not. Cassell's, compiled for late-Victorian middle-class households, gives this version a national label, though the "Irish" tag in nineteenth-century cookery books is often loose and here may refer mainly to the generous egg count and the rice flour. The rice flour is worth noting: it was commonly used to dry and lighten a heavy creamed batter before chemical raising agents were standard, and this recipe uses none at all, relying entirely on nine well-beaten eggs. Bitter almonds appear constantly in cookery books of the period, in ratafias, custards, macaroons and cakes, and were sold openly by grocers and druggists; the kernels are now restricted, though the poisonous character of prussic acid in bitter almonds was already discussed in nineteenth-century medical and toxicological writing.