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Majesty Biscuits
Blanch and pound well two ounces of bitter and two ounces of sweet almonds. Rub into a pound of flour the same quantity of butter, add one pound of crushed lump sugar, and the pounded almonds, and moisten the whole with one egg. Drop the mixture on a buttered tin, in pieces not larger than a Barcelona nut, and bake in a slow oven until the biscuits are of a pale yellow colour. When taken out of the oven they will be soft, but will harden and be quite crisp when cold. They must then be put into a tin canister, and will keep for months. Time, ten minutes to bake. Probable cost, 10d. a pound. The above ingredients are sufficient to make three pounds of biscuits.
The problem here is not technique but a single ingredient: two ounces of bitter almonds, used raw and in quantity. This recipe belongs to a period when bitter almonds sat on the grocer's shelf beside the sweet ones, and it cannot be reproduced today.
- Bitter almonds are toxicBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding and moistening does here. The lethal dose for an adult is generally put at a few dozen nuts, and far fewer for a child.
- The quantity is the issueTwo ounces is roughly 50 to 60 bitter almonds, distributed through a batch that the book itself says yields three pounds of biscuits. Baking at a low temperature for ten minutes does not reliably drive off the cyanide, and the recipe deliberately stops short of browning.
- They are not sold as foodRaw bitter almonds are not sold for eating in the United States, where regulators treat them as unfit for food, and their sale is restricted in a number of European countries. What is labelled bitter almond in a modern shop is almond extract or food-grade bitter almond oil, from which the cyanide has been removed, and neither is a substitute for two ounces of nuts.
- Sweet almonds are not a fixSwapping in four ounces of sweet almonds gives you a different biscuit, not this one — the whole point of the pairing was the sharp marzipan note the bitter nuts contributed. Use a current almond biscuit recipe rather than trying to reconstruct this one.
- On the rest of the methodFor reading purposes: crushed lump sugar is loaf sugar broken down, coarser than modern caster; a Barcelona nut is a hazelnut, so the pieces were dropped roughly half to three-quarters of an inch across; and "slow oven" is conventionally read as something in the region of 300F, though the book itself gives no temperatures.
Bitter almonds were an ordinary Victorian flavouring, sold by weight alongside sweet almonds and used wherever a cook wanted the intense marzipan character that sweet almonds alone cannot give — in ratafias, macaroons, blancmanges and almond creams. This book treats them as simply a stronger version of the same nut, with no warning about quantity, even though the toxicity of prussic acid in bitter almonds was known to chemists and reported in poisoning cases. The name Majesty Biscuits reads as one of the loosely regal titles attached to small rich baked goods in this period; it appears to signal expense and refinement, and no royal connection is documented. The recipe's closing notes on cost per pound and on storing the biscuits in a tin canister for months are typical of the book's frugal, provisioning frame of mind: a large batch made once and drawn on through the season.