Home › The Principles of Cookery › Pastry, Almond
Pastry, Almond
Make some square thin pieces of puff paste, pound some sweet and a few bitter almonds very small, mix them with the white of an egg and a little sugar; spread this upon the pieces of pastry, and bake them in an oven till they are as crisp as possible.
The problem here is not technique but a single ingredient: the recipe calls for bitter almonds, which are not a culinary nut in the modern sense and are not sold as food in the United States.
- Bitter almonds are the issueBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the nut's own enzyme converts to hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding them and mixing them with egg white does. Sweet almonds contain only traces; bitter almonds carry many times more.
- "A few" is not a quantityThe recipe gives no count, no weight and no ratio to the sweet almonds. There is no way to know whether a given batch lands well under a harmful dose or well over it, and the toxin load of individual kernels varies.
- Baking is not a safeguardThe paste sits raw on the pastry while the enzyme works, and a thin layer baked "as crisp as possible" is not a controlled heat treatment aimed at driving off cyanide. Do not treat oven time as detoxification.
- You cannot buy them anywayUnprocessed bitter almonds are barred from retail sale in the US and restricted elsewhere; what nineteenth-century cooks bought from the grocer alongside sweet almonds simply is not on the shelf. Substituting more sweet almonds does not reproduce the dish, which existed for that specific flavour.
- If you want almond pastriesUse a current recipe for almond puff pastry or almond tuiles rather than adapting this one.
Bitter almonds were a standard flavouring in British and European kitchens through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, used in ratafias, macaroons, blancmanges and puddings, and a recipe of this sort assumes the reader keeps both kinds in the store cupboard — a few bitter ones sharpen the flat sweetness of the rest, in the same way a drop of almond extract does now. The risk was known: Victorian medical and household writers warned repeatedly about ratafia and "essence of almonds" poisonings, and the trade eventually moved to benzaldehyde-based extracts and to blanched, heat-treated apricot kernels for the same note. The recipe also shows how loosely such entries were written: no oven temperature, no yield, no proportions, on the assumption that a cook already knew what puff paste and a hot oven meant.