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Macaroon Cakes
Blanch, dry, and pound an ounce of sweet and a quarter of an ounce of bitter almonds, and cut two ounces of sweet into small bits. When pounding the almonds, moisten with a tea-spoonful of brandy. Beat two eggs to a froth, and rub the almonds to a paste with them. Add to the cut almonds three-quarters of a pound of powdered sugar, and the grated rind of a lemon. Mix all together with the frothed whites of three eggs, and beat until the mass has become firm, when drop from a dessert-spoon upon writing-paper, and mould into cakes about the size of a crown-piece. Bake these of a pale colour in a gentle oven for about eighteen minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 4d.
This is a workable Victorian macaroon formula spoiled by one ingredient: the quarter-ounce of bitter almonds. That single line puts the recipe outside what can responsibly be made today.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and moistened — exactly what the recipe instructs, pounding them wet with brandy. The quantity here is small and spread across a whole batch, but baking cannot be relied on to drive the toxin off entirely, and bitter almonds are not a casual ingredient.
- They are not sold as foodRaw bitter almonds are prohibited or tightly restricted for retail sale in the United States, the UK and the EU. Anything labelled "bitter almond" in a modern shop is almond extract or bitter almond oil, from which the cyanogenic compounds have been removed; the two are not interchangeable with the nut called for here.
- Apricot and peach kernels are not a substituteThe kernels sometimes offered online as bitter almonds carry the same amygdalin, often at higher and wildly variable levels. Swapping them in makes the recipe more dangerous, not less.
- The rest of the method is soundPounded sweet almonds, whipped whites, sugar and lemon rind baked pale on paper is the standard nineteenth-century macaroon. If you want to bake macaroons, use a current recipe rather than adapting this one.
- Reading the original"Writing-paper" is the ancestor of baking parchment; a crown-piece is a coin about 38 mm across, so these were roughly 1½-inch rounds. "Probable cost, 1s. 4d." is Cassell's habitual costing note, not part of the method.
Almond macaroons reach English cookery from Italy by way of France, and Victorian versions often specify a proportion of bitter almonds among the sweet. The bitter nut was valued for the intense marzipan aroma that benzaldehyde gives, and it was an ordinary grocer's item throughout the nineteenth century, sold alongside sweet almonds for ratafias, blancmanges and flavouring puddings. Its cyanogenic chemistry was understood in outline by the mid-1800s — prussic acid distilled from bitter almond water was a known poison — but the small culinary quantities were considered harmless, and cookbooks went on printing them for decades. Regulation came later, and modern almond and ratafia essences offer the flavour without the nut.