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Rock, Dublin
Take half a pound of sweet almonds. Pick out eight of them, blanch them, cut them into strips and then throw them into rose-or orange-water till wanted. Put the rest of the almonds into a mortar with six bitter ones, and pound them to a paste with a dessert-spoonful of brandy. Add gradually two ounces of powdered sugar and four ounces of sweet butter. Pound the mixture till it looks very white, and set it in a cold place to stiffen. Dip two spoons into cold water, and with these form the paste into pieces the size and shape of an egg. Pile these in a glass dish in a rock-like form, and ornament with strips of angelica, the almonds which were put aside, and a little myrtle. Probable cost, 1s. 3d. Sufficient for a small dish.
This is a raw almond-butter confection moulded into a mound and garnished. One ingredient rules it out for a modern kitchen, and the rest of the notes are for reading rather than cooking.
- The six bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and moistened — exactly what pounding them wet in a mortar does. Nothing here is heated, so nothing drives the cyanide off, and the paste is eaten raw. Sale of bitter almonds for eating is restricted or prohibited in the US and much of Europe for this reason; a current recipe should be used instead.
- Why the quantity mattersEstimates of a toxic dose for an adult run to several dozen bitter almonds, and far fewer for a child.
- Bitter almond flavouring is not the same thingModern "bitter almond" essence and almond extract are benzaldehyde-based and carry no cyanide. Recipes of this period call for the nut itself.
- Sweet almonds, blanchedBlanching means a brief dip in boiling water so the brown skins slip off — done here for whiteness, since the whole point of the dish is a pale, snowy paste.
- The archaic measuresA dessert-spoonful is roughly two teaspoons. "Sweet butter" means fresh unsalted butter, not sweetened. The "probable cost, 1s. 3d." is the shilling-and-pence pricing Cassell's gave for household budgeting.
- Angelica and myrtleCandied angelica stem was the standard green garnish of the Victorian dessert table, cut into strips to read as foliage. The myrtle is a sprig of the fresh shrub, used decoratively and not meant to be eaten.
- The two spoonsDipping two spoons in cold water and passing the paste between them is the old quenelle method — it keeps the butter from smearing and gives the smooth ovoid the recipe calls an egg.
The recipe belongs to what can broadly be recognised as a family of moulded almond-paste "rocks" and "snows" of the kind served at the dessert stage of a nineteenth-century dinner, when a sweet was judged as much on its silhouette in a glass dish as on its taste. The name simply describes the shape: the pieces are heaped up to suggest a craggy outcrop, then planted with green angelica and myrtle to imitate vegetation, a conceit common in Victorian confectionery. Why it is called Dublin is not documented; regional and city tags in Victorian cookery dictionaries were often attached loosely, sometimes to a supposed place of origin and sometimes to nothing more than a cook or a household that had made the dish fashionable. The bitter almonds are the period detail that dates it most sharply efore others regulated their toxicity they were a routine flavouring, sold alongside sweet almonds and used a few at a time to sharpen an otherwise bland paste, much as almond extract is used now.