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ORGEAT, SYRUP OF (for flavouring Sauces, Cream, etc.)
Take half a pound of sweet almonds and two ounces of bitter ones. Blanch and pound them in a mortar, and whilst pounding keep adding a few drops of orange-flower water to prevent oiling. Stir in by degrees two pints of cold water; add two pounds and a half of powdered and sifted sugar, two ounces of orange-flower water, and a tea-spoonful of the essence of lemon. Put the mixture into a warm place for five or six hours, then boil for ten minutes. Strain through a calico bag, and press out all the milk of the almonds. If the syrup is not sufficiently thick, it should be boiled again on the following day. When it is cold, bottle for use. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for two quarts of orgeat.
The flavour of this syrup depends on two ounces of bitter almonds, and that is the reason it cannot be made as written today.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding in a mortar and stirring in water accomplishes here. Raw bitter almonds run to roughly 4–9 mg of releasable cyanide per kernel, and two ounces is on the order of forty to fifty kernels concentrated into two quarts of syrup used by the spoonful over weeks.
- Boiling does not make it safeThe ten-minute boil will drive off some hydrogen cyanide, which is volatile, but a domestic boil cannot be relied on to make the syrup safe. Commercial bitter almond flavouring is processed specifically to remove the cyanide; a mortar and a saucepan do not do that job.
- They are also not sold to home cooksRaw bitter almonds are not permitted for food use in the US, and their sale for direct consumption is restricted in the UK and EU. Anything labelled bitter almond on a modern shelf is likely to be an extract (benzaldehyde, free of prussic acid) or apricot kernels, which carry the same amygdalin problem and are subject to their own consumption warnings.
- Unrefrigerated fermentWarm standing -- The mixture is set in a warm place for five or six hours to draw out the flavour; the recipe does not say a ferment is intended. Modern practice would not hold a dilute nut milk at room temperature for that long, sugar or no sugar, though it is boiled directly afterwards.
- Use a current recipeOrgeat is still made commercially and in modern bar recipes from sweet almonds plus a measured almond extract, with acid and proper storage. Use one of those rather than adapting this.
- Reading the originalFor context: orange-flower water is still sold as orange blossom water; "essence of lemon" was usually oil of lemon dissolved in spirit, and is stronger than modern lemon extract; a calico bag is a plain cotton straining cloth. "Probable cost, 2s" is the retail estimate the book gives for most of its entries.
Orgeat descends from a medieval barley drink — the name comes through French from Latin hordeum, barley — which was later reworked around almonds while keeping the old word. Nineteenth-century confectioners and cooks prized bitter almonds precisely because the compound that makes them dangerous, amygdalin, breaks down into benzaldehyde, the sharp marzipan note that sweet almonds lack; a small proportion of bitter to sweet appears repeatedly in period recipes for ratafias, macaroons and almond syrups, and the ratio here of two ounces to eight is in line with them. The hazard was understood in outline — Victorian pharmacopoeias discussed prussic acid in almond and cherry-laurel water, and poisoning cases were reported — but the dose in a domestic syrup was not regulated, and bitter almonds could be bought from the grocer alongside sweet. Orgeat itself outlived the domestic use of the nut: it became a soda-fountain and later a tiki-bar staple, still recognisably the same almond-and-orange-flower syrup, now flavoured with an extract instead.