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Orgeat Ice Cream
Take one ounce of sweet almonds and two or three bitter ones. Blanch and pound them in a mortar with a little orange-flower water to prevent them oiling. Add gradually a quarter of a pound of powdered sugar, the well-beaten yolks of eight eggs, and a pint of cream. Put the mixture into an enamelled saucepan, and stir it without ceasing until it begins to thicken. Pour it out, stir it again until it is cold, then freeze in the usual way. Time, five or six minutes to stir the mixture over the fire. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. Sufficient for a pint and a half of ice cream.
The recipe is a straightforward almond custard frozen in a pail freezer, but it is built on bitter almonds, which is why it cannot be made as printed.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the almond's own enzyme converts to hydrogen cyanide as soon as the kernel is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding in a mortar with orange-flower water does. Their sale for eating is prohibited in the United States and restricted elsewhere, and the dose in a home kitchen is unmeasurable.
- Nothing in the method destroys itThe custard is only stirred over the fire for five or six minutes, until it thickens — well short of anything that would drive off the volatile cyanide, and the mixture is then cooled and frozen rather than boiled. Any recipe using bitter almonds should be read, not cooked; use a current orgeat ice cream recipe instead.
- Orgeat, then and nowIn nineteenth-century usage orgeat meant an almond syrup or emulsion, traditionally sharpened with a few bitter kernels. The modern bottled orgeat sold for cocktails is a different, sweeter product and is not what this recipe assumes.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold in Middle Eastern groceries and baking aisles, and considerably stronger than most cooks expect — a teaspoon perfumes a whole custard. The original uses it here as a lubricant to stop the almonds turning to oil under the pestle, not primarily as flavouring.
- The unitsA pint in an English book of this date is 20 fl oz, so a pint of cream is about 2 1/2 US cups. "Powdered sugar" means sugar ground fine at home, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar on modern shelves; granulated is the closer equivalent. Eight yolks to a pint of cream is a very rich custard by any standard.
- "Freeze in the usual way"The assumption is a hand-cranked pail packed with ice and coarse salt, which both chills and churns. The instruction to stir the custard until cold before freezing is sound practice and survives: it prevents a skin forming and keeps the texture smooth.
- Cost and yieldTwo shillings and sixpence was a real outlay for a dessert in a household of this period, the cream and eggs accounting for much of it. The stated yield is a pint and a half.
Cassell's places this among the frozen creams and waters that a late-Victorian kitchen was expected to turn out for a dinner of any pretension, and the flavouring points straight back to French confectionery: orgeat descends, through Old French, from Latin hordeum, barley, because the original drink was a barley emulsion before almonds displaced the grain. The trick of adding two or three bitter kernels to a larger quantity of sweet ones was standard across eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cookery /kernels and peach kernels all carry the same marzipan intensity / though how freely cookery writers recommended them varied, and a number of nineteenth-century writers did caution about bitter almonds. Regulation came later, once the cyanogenic chemistry was properly understood, and the flavour survives today in synthesised benzaldehyde-based almond extract. The instruction to pound with orange-flower water is a genuine confectioner's technique: almond paste worked dry in a mortar quickly separates into oil, and a little liquid keeps the emulsion together.