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Potato and Almond Pudding
Mash six ounces of boiled potatoes, dry and floury, till they are perfectly smooth. Blanch three ounces of sweet almonds and four bitter ones, and pound them, but not finely, with a little orange-flower water. Let them simmer in half a pint of new milk until the flavour is drawn out, and dissolve in the milk four ounces of fresh butter and four ounces of powdered sugar. Stir the mixture into the potatoes, add a pinch of salt, a little grated nutmeg, and the rind and juice of half a lemon. Beat the pudding till it is light and smooth, and add separately the yolks and well-whisked whites of five eggs. Line a pie-dish with puff-paste, and pour in the mixture. Chop half a dozen almonds rather coarsely, strew them over the pudding, and bake in a well-heated oven for one hour. Probable cost, 1s. 8d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
The problem is four words long: four bitter ones. Bitter almonds were a standard Victorian flavouring and are the reason this pudding cannot be reproduced as printed.
- Bitter almonds are a cyanide sourceBitter almond kernels contain amygdalin, which the almond's own enzyme converts to hydrogen cyanide as soon as the nut is crushed and wetted. Pounding them with orange-flower water and steeping them in warm milk sets exactly that conversion going. Hydrogen cyanide is volatile, so simmering the milk and an hour in the oven will carry off some of it, but nothing in the method tells you how much, and the recipe gives no way to control it.
- The quantity is not trivially smallA single bitter almond can yield on the order of a milligram of hydrogen cyanide, and reported toxic doses for children begin in the range of a few kernels. Four kernels spread over a pudding "sufficient for four or five persons" is not a reassuring margin, particularly when the recipe gives no control over kernel size or how much of the flavoured milk each portion receives.
- They are no longer a grocery itemRaw bitter almonds are prohibited or restricted for retail sale in the United States and tightly controlled elsewhere, so the ingredient itself is not obtainable through ordinary channels. Sweet almonds are a different cultivar and carry no comparable amygdalin load.
- Almond flavour is not the same as bitter almondModern bottled almond extract, whether synthetic benzaldehyde or a distilled natural product, exists because the flavour compound was separated from the toxin. That separation is an industrial process, not something a kitchen steeping can accomplish.
- What to do insteadIf you want a Victorian potato and almond pudding, work from a current recipe that does not call for bitter kernels. Nothing else in the method here is dangerous, but the flavouring is integral to it, so the page is best read rather than cooked.
- Reading the rest of itFor context: "new milk" is simply fresh whole milk, and orange-flower water is still sold by Middle Eastern grocers. The potatoes are used as a starch binder in the same way ground rice or breadcrumbs would be.
Potato puddings belong to a large family of late-Georgian and Victorian sweet dishes in which a cheap starch carries expensive flavourings: eggs, butter, sugar, lemon and almonds. The potato is doing the work that breadcrumbs, ground rice or semolina do elsewhere, and dry floury potatoes are specified. The bitter almonds are the period detail. Before commercial almond essence became cheap and reliable, cooks could reach for a few bitter kernels, or for peach and apricot stones, when they wanted that pronounced marzipan note, and English cookery books printed the instruction without comment. Poisoning cases involving bitter almonds and their oil were recorded through the nineteenth century, and the ingredient's gradual disappearance from domestic recipes is often linked, though not demonstrably, to the rise of manufactured benzaldehyde flavouring and to food regulation that treated the kernel as a hazard rather than a spice.