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Ratafia Cream, Iced
Blanch two ounces of bitter almonds, and pound them to a smooth paste with a tea-spoonful of rose-water, or water, to prevent them oiling. Add gradually a table-spoonful of powdered loaf sugar, mix the paste with a quarter of a pint of cream, and stir over a gentle fire till pleasantly flavoured. Add another pint of cream, strain the mixture through a jelly-bag, and freeze in the usual way. Time to boil the cream with the almonds, ten minutes. Probable cost, 2s. 4d. Sufficient for a little more than a pint of ice-cream.
This is an ice cream built on bitter almonds, which is the whole problem: the flavour the recipe is after comes from the same compound that makes them poisonous. The notes below explain why the quantity here is out of range, and gloss the period vocabulary for readers working through the book.
- Bitter almonds are the hazardBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the almond's own enzyme converts to hydrogen cyanide as soon as the kernel is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding to a paste with rose-water does. Two ounces of them, pounded raw, is not a trace flavouring; it is a meaningful cyanide dose in a dish sized for about a pint.
- Nothing here destroys itNothing here can be relied on to destroy it -- The recipe stirs the cream over a gentle fire until "pleasantly flavoured" and its time line allows ten minutes' boiling with the almonds. Boiling does drive off some hydrogen cyanide, which is volatile, but it cannot be relied on to remove what the pounding has already released, and freezing does nothing at all. Whatever remains is in a cold sweet that is easy to eat quickly and in quantity.
- Children and small servingsIces are served to everyone at the table, and the tolerance for cyanide is proportional to body weight. A portion that merely made an adult unwell could be far more serious for a child. Use a current ice cream recipe instead.
- Sale of bitter almonds todayRaw bitter almonds are restricted or banned from retail sale in a number of countries for this reason. The ingredient also faded from cookbooks over the twentieth century as commercial essences displaced it. Where a modern recipe says "ratafia" or "almond" flavour it means an extract, a commercial essence, or ratafia biscuits.
- Loaf sugarSugar was sold as a hard cone or loaf, broken off and pounded as needed; "powdered loaf sugar" is simply fine white sugar. It carries no relevance to the hazard, but it explains why so many recipes of the period call for pounding.
- Jelly-bag and "freeze in the usual way"A jelly-bag is a conical cloth strainer, here used to remove almond solids; a fine sieve lined with muslin was the equivalent. "Freeze in the usual way" assumed a pewter freezing pot packed in a tub of ice and coarse salt, scraped and worked by hand — Cassell's expected the reader to know the method from elsewhere in the book.
- The price line"Probable cost, 2s. 4d." is pre-decimal sterling: two shillings and fourpence. Costings like this appear throughout the dictionary because it was sold as a housekeeping manual as much as a cookery book.
Ratafia was one of the defining flavours of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English confectionery — a bitter-almond note used in creams, ices, puddings and the small hard macaroon-like ratafia biscuits still occasionally sold. The word came into English from French, where ratafia denoted a flavoured cordial, and the name is generally traced to the practice of drinking such a liqueur to seal an agreement, though that derivation is traditional rather than documented. Cooks reached for bitter almonds, peach and apricot kernels and cherry stones because they all yield the same intense marzipan-like aroma, and the same toxic compound behind it; the flavour and the danger are inseparable. Nineteenth-century writers were not wholly ignorant of this, and household guides of the period sometimes warn against excess, but the risk was understood as a matter of degree rather than a reason to abandon the ingredient. Cassell's, compiled for a middle-class household running its own kitchen and its own ice tub, prints the amount without comment; commercial almond essence and, later, synthetic benzaldehyde eventually made the real kernel unnecessary.