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Rice Flummery
Mix two table-spoonfuls of ground rice to a smooth paste with cold milk, and stir into it a pint of boiling milk which has been sweetened and flavoured with a quarter of an ounce of bitter almonds blanched and pounded. Boil the mixture, stir constantly until it leaves the bottom of the saucepan, then pour it into a mould. When it is quite cold and stiff, turn it out, and stick all over it blanched almonds cut into straws. Pour cream or thin custard round the flummery, or a sauce made with wine, lemon-juice, and sugar. If preferred, cinnamon, lemon-rind, or vanilla may be used to flavour the flummery instead of almonds. Time, about ten minutes to boil the rice. Probable cost, exclusive of the sauce, 6d. Sufficient for a pint mould.
The flummery itself is a simple boiled ground-rice mould, but the flavouring specified here is a poison. The bitter almonds cannot be substituted into the method below and the recipe treated as sound; use a current recipe if you want to make a rice flummery.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the enzyme emulsin converts to hydrogen cyanide as soon as the kernels are crushed and wetted. Pounding a quarter of an ounce and steeping it in hot milk is precisely the process that liberates that cyanide, and boiling for ten minutes does not reliably drive it off.
- The quantity is not trivialA quarter of an ounce is roughly 7 g, several kernels' worth, infused into a single pint mould intended to be eaten cold in slices. The toxic margin is narrower for children than for adults.
- You cannot buy them anywayYou cannot readily buy them anyway -- Unprocessed bitter almonds are not generally available for food use in the UK, the US or the EU. What is sold as "bitter almond" today is usually an essence or an oil from which the hydrocyanic acid has been removed, and those products are not interchangeable, kernel for kernel, with what this recipe means.
- The blanched almonds stuck on top are a different thingThe garnish of almonds "cut into straws" is ordinary sweet almonds and is harmless. The hazard lies entirely in the pounded bitter kernels steeped into the milk.
- Peach and apricot kernels are not a workaroundSome nineteenth-century recipes substitute apricot or peach kernels for bitter almonds. They contain the same amygdalin, in some cases at higher levels, and carry the same risk.
Flummery began in Britain and Wales as a sour, jellied oatmeal dish — the Welsh llymru is usually given as the source of the name — and by the eighteenth century the word had drifted upmarket to mean any pale, moulded, set cream or starch pudding, which is roughly when "flummery" also acquired its second meaning of empty flattery. Ground rice was cheap and thickened reliably. The bitter almond flavouring reflects a long Georgian and Victorian fondness for the noyau or ratafia note in creams and blancmanges, obtained from bitter kernels before manufactured essences were dependable; poisonings from bitter-almond flavourings were reported during the period.