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Ratafia Puddings
Blanch and pound to a smooth paste four ounces of sweet almonds and three or four bitter ones. Add a few drops of water to prevent oiling. Mix with the paste a table-spoonful of sugar, two ounces of fresh butter which has been dissolved in a quarter of a pint of hot milk or cream, a table-spoonful of brandy, and two well-beaten eggs. Butter some small cups, half fill them with the mixture, and bake in a well-heated oven. When done enough, turn the puddings out carefully, sift white sugar thickly over them, and serve with wine sauce. Time to bake, fifteen to twenty minutes. Probable cost, exclusive of the brandy, 10d., if made with milk. Sufficient for three or four persons.
This is a baked almond custard whose flavour depends entirely on bitter almonds, and that is the reason it cannot be made from these instructions today.
- The bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the nut's own enzyme converts to hydrogen cyanide as soon as the kernels are crushed and moistened — exactly what pounding with a few drops of water accomplishes. Three or four kernels divided between three or four servings is a small quantity, but the ingredient is a regulated one and the recipe offers no way to gauge it.
- Baking does not make it safeHydrogen cyanide is volatile and some is driven off by heat, but fifteen to twenty minutes in a cup of wet custard is not a reliable way to remove it, and no quantity here is measured against any safe limit. The recipe gives no way to know what remains.
- You cannot buy the ingredient anywayUnprocessed bitter almonds are not permitted for retail sale in the United States and are subject to controls elsewhere; what is sold as bitter almond flavouring is benzaldehyde, either synthetic or natural oil from which the prussic acid has been removed. A modern recipe using that flavouring is the thing to look for instead.
- On the costing"Probable cost, exclusive of the brandy, 10d., if made with milk" is ten pence in pre-decimal currency; costings of this kind run throughout the book, and the brandy is simply left out of the reckoning.
Ratafia was originally a sweetened, flavoured spirit, and by the eighteenth century the word had drifted in English usage to mean the almond-and-kernel flavour that such cordials carried — hence ratafia biscuits, ratafia creams and puddings like this one. The taste came from bitter almonds or from the kernels of peaches, apricots and cherries, all of which release benzaldehyde, the compound responsible for the flavour's characteristic sharpness, when amygdalin breaks down. Cassell's, compiled in the 1870s and reissued for decades after, was a household reference rather than a fashionable book, and its inclusion of a dish like this shows how ordinary the ingredient still was in a British kitchen.