Home › The Principles of Cookery › Italian Sandwiches
Italian Sandwiches
Beat up the yolk of an egg with nearly a quarter of a pint of cold water, and make with it into a stiff paste a quarter of a pound of baked flour into which two ounces of good butter have been rubbed, an ounce and a half of sifted sugar, and as much cinnamon as will lie on a shilling. Put this paste on a board and roll it out very thin (it should not be quite a quarter of an inch), divide it into strips of an inch in width, and from three to four inches in length. These strips must be first hardened. Put them in a cool, well-ventilated place. In the meantime prepare the following mixture. Beat the whites of three eggs to a froth, with two ounces of powdered loaf sugar. Blanch and pound two ounces of sweet and twelve bitter almonds, mix them with the egg-froth until it is a soft smooth paste, when spread half the strips of paste with the mixture, and cover with the other half. Bake a pale brown. Time, four or five hours to harden, sixteen to eighteen minutes to bake. Probable cost, 1s. 4d.
This is a nineteenth-century almond wafer sandwiched with a meringue-and-almond paste, and it cannot be made as printed: the filling calls for twelve bitter almonds. The notes below explain the hazard and gloss the archaic terms, but no substitute quantities or timings are given.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the enzyme emulsin converts to hydrogen cyanide once the kernel is crushed and moistened — which is what blanching, pounding and mixing into egg white does here. Twelve kernels in one small batch is enough to be a real concern, although some of the hydrogen cyanide is volatile and driven off in baking; the risk is proportionally greater for a child.
- Why Victorian cooks used them anywayBitter almonds were a common source of almond flavour before synthetic benzaldehyde was cheap, and cookbooks of the period treated a dozen as an ordinary seasoning. Their danger in quantity was also known at the time.
- They are not sold for eating nowRaw bitter almonds cannot legally be sold as food in the United States, and their use is restricted in the UK and EU. Products sold today as "bitter almond" are generally extracts or oils free from prussic acid, or synthetic benzaldehyde. If you want a dish of this kind, use a current recipe.
- Baked flourFlour dried in a slow oven and sifted, used to make a drier, shorter, longer-keeping paste. The practice faded as commercial flour became more reliably dry and finely milled.
- Loaf sugar, powderedSugar broken from a cone and crushed fine — closest in the modern pantry to caster sugar rather than icing sugar, which contains anti-caking starch.
- The odd measurements"Nearly a quarter of a pint" of water is a little under 5 fl oz imperial, about 140 ml. "As much cinnamon as will lie on a shilling" means a coin-sized heap, perhaps a quarter teaspoon; the pre-decimal shilling was about 23.5 mm across.
- The four-hour hardeningThe strips are air-dried before filling, presumably so the wet meringue paste does not soften them. The long drying is a keeping-biscuit technique rather than one for something baked and eaten the same afternoon.
Cassell's uses "Italian" here in the loose Victorian sense of anything almond-and-meringue in the confectioner's line — the family of amaretti, ratafias and macaroons that English cooks associated with Italian pastry work. The recipe teaches a technique through a specimen dish: here, a stiff egg-yolk paste rolled thin and dried, then joined with a raw meringue filling that sets in the oven. The reliance on bitter almonds dates it loosely. Through most of the nineteenth century they were the ordinary flavouring for macaroons and ratafias, and their toxicity, though well documented in the medical literature of the day, did not keep them out of domestic manuals; it was the arrival of cheap synthetic almond essence and, later, food-safety regulation that pushed them out of the household cupboard.