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Pope's Posset
Blanch eight ounces of sweet almonds and six or eight bitter ones, and pound them in a mortar with a few drops of water to prevent them oiling. Put them into a pint of cold water, and bring the liquid slowly to a boil. Strain, and mix with it a bottle of white wine boiling hot. Add sugar to taste, and serve. Time, about half an hour to prepare. Sufficient for a quart jug.
This is a nineteenth-century almond-milk posset, and the problem with it is the bitter almonds — a deliberate ingredient here, not an accident of translation.
- Bitter almonds are the reason to stopBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — precisely what pounding in a mortar with water accomplishes. Six to eight of them steeped and served out of a quart jug is not a quantity to treat as decorative.
- Boiling does not make it safeHeating drives off some of the volatile hydrogen cyanide, but this recipe brings the almond water only slowly to a boil and then strains it into wine; nothing here guarantees the poison has gone. Commercial bitter almond flavourings are processed specifically to remove it, which a mortar and a saucepan cannot do.
- They are not sold as food anywayRaw bitter almonds cannot legally be sold for eating in the United States, and are restricted in much of Europe.
- Almond extract is not a substitute hereBenzaldehyde-based extract gives the flavour without the amygdalin, but swapping it in changes the dish enough that you are following a different recipe. If you want almond-milk posset, use a current one.
- What the rest of it tells youStrip out the bitter almonds and what remains is unremarkable and safe in principle — sweet almond milk cut with boiling white wine and sugar, served hot. The archaic parts are minor: a bottle of wine is taken as roughly 750 ml, and "sufficient for a quart jug" is about 1.1 litres, or four generous glasses.
A posset was originally hot milk curdled with wine or ale, drunk as a nightcap and prescribed for colds well into the eighteenth century; by the time this recipe was compiled the word covered a range of hot spiced drinks, some of them, like this one, made with almond milk rather than dairy − a survival of the medieval and Lenten practice of substituting pounded almonds for milk on fast days. The small measure of bitter almonds is entirely characteristic of period confectionery and drinks, where they were used the way we now use almond extract, for the marzipan note that sweet almonds alone do not give — the dose casually specified.