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Plum Pudding, Hedgehog
Grate one pound of stale bread very finely, and mix with it half a pound of dried flour. Add a tea-spoonful of salt, a pound of currants carefully cleaned and dried, a pound of raisins stoned and chopped, a pound of beef suet finely minced, two ounces each of candied lemon. citron, and orange, half a pound of brown sugar, some lump sugar which has been rubbed on the rind of a large lemon and crushed to powder, a small nutmeg, grated, an ounce of sweet almonds and three bitter ones blanched and chopped small. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly; moisten them with eight eggs well beaten up and mixed with a glass of brandy or a glassful of ale. If preferred, milk may be used instead of the ale, but no more liquid should be employed than is required to moisten the pudding. Tie the pudding in a mould or cloth, put it into a large pan of boiling water, and keep it boiling until done enough. If a mould is used, the pudding should entirely fill it. Turn it out, and when it is dished, stick over it, as thickly as possible, three ounces of almonds which have been already blanched. This pudding will keep for six months after boiling. It will only require to be boiled again for an hour before being used. Time to boil, ten hours. If the pudding is allowed to simmer only, the sweetness will go into the water. Probable cost, 3s. 6d. Sufficient for eight or nine persons.
The bulk of this pudding is unremarkable Victorian Christmas fare, but one ingredient in the list disqualifies it: the three bitter almonds.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed, chewed or wetted — exactly what happens when they are blanched, chopped and mixed into a wet batter. They come from the same almond species as sweet almonds, but they differ chemically in carrying the glycoside.
- Boiling does not make them safeSome of the volatile cyanide is driven off by prolonged heat, but the loss is unpredictable and depends on how finely the nuts were chopped and how enclosed the pudding was in its cloth or mould. A ten-hour boil is not a reliable detoxification step, and the recipe also directs that the pudding be kept for months and reboiled.
- They are not legally sold as foodRaw bitter almonds cannot be bought over the counter in the United States and are restricted in many other countries. Where a Victorian cook could obtain them readily, a modern reader would have to source them deliberately, which is the point at which to stop.
- Almond flavouring is not a substitute in kindModern almond extract carries the same benzaldehyde note the bitter almond was wanted for; where it is made from bitter almond or stone-fruit kernels, the cyanogenic compounds are removed in processing. Current Christmas pudding recipes generally call for extract rather than the nut.
- The rest of the recipe is period-typicalA pound each of currants, raisins and suet, eight eggs, and a ten-hour boil are all ordinary for a large Victorian plum pudding, and the recipe itself warns that allowing the pudding only to simmer will send the sweetness into the water. None of that rescues the almonds.
- What to do insteadUse a current Christmas or plum pudding recipe. There are many, they are close relatives of this one, and none of them require a controlled ingredient.
Cassell's gives this the name "hedgehog" for the finish rather than the mixture: three ounces of blanched almonds stuck over the turned-out pudding, bristling like an animal's spines. Hedgehog puddings, cakes and creams appear in nineteenth-century English cookery books, the almond-spike treatment being applied to various dishes. The bitter almonds in the batter belong to an older habit of using them in small numbers alongside sweet almonds to sharpen the marzipan note — a practice that survived in print well into the twentieth century before commercial extracts and food-safety regulation displaced it. The instruction that the pudding will keep six months and need only an hour's reboiling reflects a household economy in which puddings were made well ahead of the day and stored in their cloths until wanted.