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Macaroni Pudding, with Almonds
Blanch an ounce of sweet and four or five bitter almonds; cut them small, and soak them with four ounces of macaroni broken into inch lengths in a pint of milk. In an hour or two, when the macaroni has well soaked, simmer it over a slow fire, adding a pint of cream or milk, and as much sugar--pounded loaf--as will sweeten (say about four ounces). When the pudding has simmered and cooled, stir in two ounces of butter in bits, and six well-beaten eggs. Pour the mixture, which should be beaten for some minutes, into a buttered pie-dish, and bake in a moderate oven, with cinnamon or grated nutmeg over the top. Time to simmer macaroni, three-quarters of an hour; to bake, about one hour.
This pudding cannot be made as printed. The problem is the bitter almonds, which were a standard flavouring in Victorian Britain and are now restricted or banned for sale as food in most countries.
- Bitter almonds are the reasonBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the nut's own enzyme converts to hydrogen cyanide once the kernel is crushed, chewed or wetted. The four or five called for here are cut small and steeped in milk, which is exactly the condition that liberates the toxin.
- The dose is not trivialBitter almond kernels typically carry a few milligrams of releasable cyanide each, and the toxic threshold for a child is a small handful. A pudding built on a pint of milk and six eggs is a shared dish, but the margin is far too narrow to be treated as a matter of taste.
- Baking does not make it safeHeat drives off some hydrogen cyanide and destroys the enzyme, but the almonds have already sat in cold milk for an hour or two before any heat is applied. Neither the simmering nor the hour in the oven can be relied on to clear what has formed.
- Sweet almonds are not a fixThe ounce of sweet almonds contributes texture and only a mild flavour, not the marzipan note the cook was after. Simply leaving out the bitter ones gives a different pudding, and the rest of the method has not been tested that way here.
- If you want this dishUse a current baked macaroni pudding recipe, where the almond note comes from commercial almond extract or flavouring made to a controlled benzaldehyde specification.
- On the original's measuresFor reading purposes: pounded loaf sugar stands in for granulated or caster sugar, broken from a hard cone with a sugar cutter and crushed in a mortar; the book gives no oven temperatures, and 'moderate' is conventionally read today as somewhere around 350F. A pie-dish is an earthenware baking dish, commonly oval, not a pastry case.
Sweet macaroni puddings belong to a long English line of milk-and-starch baked puddings — rice, sago, vermicelli, macaroni — in which pasta functions as a thickener rather than a savoury food. Italian macaroni was familiar in British kitchens well before the nineteenth century, appearing in English recipe books from much earlier, and was for a long time as likely to be served with cream, sugar and nutmeg as with cheese. The bitter almonds are the period detail: before synthetic almond flavouring, cooks reached for a few bitter kernels, or for ratafia biscuits, noyau and almond waters made from them, to give the marzipan note that sweet almonds alone do not supply. Cassell's editors treat them as an everyday grocery, and the hazard was not unknown at the time — nineteenth-century medical journals record poisonings from almond flavourings — but regulation of the kernels as food came only much later, which is why a recipe like this reads as ordinary in its own book and unusable in ours.