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NOYEAU, IMITATION (another way, for immediate use)
Gather a quarter of a pound of young peach leaves on a dry, sunny day. Put them into a jar, and pour over them two pints of good brandy or whisky, and leave them to infuse for a couple of days. Add a syrup made by dissolving a pound of sugar in a pint of water. Let the noyeau remain a few hours longer, then filter it carefully, and it is ready for use. Probable cost, uncertain, peach leaves being seldom sold. Sufficient for three pints and a half of noyeau.
This is a cold infusion of peach leaves in spirit, made to imitate the almond-scented liqueur noyau. The flavour the recipe is chasing comes from the same compound that makes it dangerous, and there is no way to separate the two at home.
- Why the leaves smell of almondPeach leaves, like cherry laurel leaves and the kernels of bitter almond, apricot and cherry, contain cyanogenic glycosides (prunasin in the leaves, amygdalin in the kernels). Crushed or steeped in the presence of water, enzymes in the plant tissue release benzaldehyde -- the marzipan aroma the recipe wants -- together with hydrogen cyanide.
- Quarter of a pound is a large doseThat is roughly 115 g of fresh leaf material extracted into two pints of spirit, drunk undiluted as a cordial. Cyanide yield from peach leaf varies enormously with variety, season and how bruised the leaves are, so the strength of any given batch is unknowable. There is no safe margin to work within.
- Filtering does nothingThe instruction to "filter it carefully" removes leaf matter only. The active compounds are dissolved in the alcohol and syrup and pass straight through. Nor is the liqueur ever heated, so nothing is driven off.
- Commercial noyau is not made this wayModern cr eueurs are flavoured with benzaldehyde or almond flavouring, or with kernel extracts made under legal limits on hydrogen cyanide content. Buy the bottle, or use a current recipe based on food-grade almond extract.
- The other archaic details, for reading onlyA pint here is the imperial pint, 20 fl oz, so "two pints of good brandy" is about 1.1 litres. The finished yield of three and a half pints is roughly two litres. Cassell's note that the cost is "uncertain, peach leaves being seldom sold" tells you this was a recipe for households with their own trees.
History: Noyau (usually spelled noyau, from the French for the stone or kernel of a fruit) was a sweet spirit flavoured with apricot or cherry kernels, sold in Europe from the eighteenth century onward -- the best-known survivor being Noyau de Poissy. Because real kernels were expensive and imported, English domestic cookery books carried numerous imitations built on whatever gave the same bitter-almond note: peach leaves, cherry laurel leaves, bitter almonds, apricot stones. That the substitutes worked at all is chemistry rather than coincidence -- all of them belong to the genus Prunus and all carry cyanogenic glycosides. The danger was not wholly unknown; cherry-laurel water had featured in notorious poisoning cases. Even so, recipes like this one circulated freely in respectable household dictionaries. Cassell's offers more than one version of imitation noyau, this being the "immediate use" one, needing days rather than the weeks a kernel infusion demanded.