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Polish Pudding
Blanch one ounces of sweet almonds and six bitter ones, and pound them in a mortar to a smooth paste, adding a few drops of water to prevent their oiling. Put them into a saucepan with half a pint of new milk, and bring the liquid slowly to the boil. Mix two table-spoonfuls of arrowroot very smoothly with half a pint of cold milk. Pour the boiling milk upon this, and stir briskly for a minute or two. Add two ounces of fresh butter, and two well-beaten eggs, and stir the mixture again until it is cool. Put it into an oiled mould, and set it upon ice, if possible; if not, lay it in a cool place until it is wanted. Turn it out before serving, and send hot plates to table with it, and the following sauce in a tureen.-Beat two ounces of fresh butter to a cream. Add two ounces of powdered sugar and two glassfuls of sherry, and mix thoroughly. Put the mixture into a small saucepan, and stir gently until it boils. Serve immediately. Time, six or eight hours to set the pudding, if it is not put upon ice. Probable cost, 1s., exclusive of the sherry. Sufficient for four or five persons.
Two things in this pudding put it outside modern practice: the bitter almonds and the raw egg. The points below explain what goes wrong rather than how to fix it; for an almond-flavoured arrowroot mould, use a current recipe.
- Bitter almonds are the disqualifying ingredientBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding them in a mortar with a few drops of water accomplishes. Six nuts divided among four or five people is a small quantity, well below the doses recorded in poisoning cases, but little in this method drives the cyanide off, since the almond paste is only brought slowly to a boil in milk and then chilled. Raw bitter almonds are now restricted or effectively unavailable for domestic sale in a number of countries, including the United States, for this reason.
- The eggs never reach a safe temperatureTwo beaten eggs go into a mixture that is already off the heat and is then stirred only until cool, moulded, and set for six to eight hours. The eggs are effectively raw, and where ice is not available and the pudding is simply left in a cool larder, it spends those hours in a range where Salmonella can multiply. A Victorian cook working with a block of ice in a cold larder was taking a risk that was simply invisible at the time.
- "New milk" and "fresh butter"New milk meant milk drawn that day and unpasteurised — a further reason this particular set of instructions belongs to its own period. Fresh butter meant unsalted, as opposed to the heavily salted butter kept for storage.
- Arrowroot as the setting agentTwo tablespoonfuls of arrowroot to a pint of milk is a light set, which is why the pudding needs so many hours in the cold before it will turn out of the mould. Arrowroot was prized in invalid cookery for being easily digested and for setting clear rather than cloudy, unlike cornflour.
- Hot plates with a cold puddingThe direction to send hot plates to table looks deliberate: the pudding is served chilled while the sherry sauce goes to table boiling, and on a cold plate the butter in the sauce would be liable to set into streaks. The book itself gives no reason.
- A glassful of sherryAn unhelpfully vague measure even by the standards of the period. In wine-sauce recipes of the time a glass generally means a wineglass, usually reckoned at roughly 2 fl oz, so two glassfuls is somewhere near half a cup — but the book does not say, and the figure should be treated as approximate.
- Costs and yieldOne shilling exclusive of the sherry, for four or five persons. The sherry is left out of the reckoning altogether, so the true cost of the dish was higher than the figure given.
Cassell's, in common with other late-Victorian English dictionaries of cookery, attached national labels to sweet moulds fairly loosely: "Polish", "Russian", "German" and "Danish" puddings in these books rarely have a documented connection to the countries named, and often signal little more than an almond flavouring, a spirit sauce, or a shape the compiler associated with the Continent. What is genuinely of its period is the almond pairing. Until well into the twentieth century, English confectioners are said to have used bitter almonds to sharpen the flavour of sweet ones, and the same practice underlies ratafia biscuits and old-fashioned almond essence. The hazard was known als record poisonings from bitter almond oil reas as harmless, and the trade only fell away as commercial benzaldehyde-based flavourings and legal restrictions made the real nuts both unnecessary and hard to buy.