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Royal Pastry
Take four ounces of sweet almonds ground or finely pounded, with three or four bitter ones, mix them with a table-spoonful of powdered sugar, and add as much white of egg as will make a smooth paste. Mix an ounce of finely-sifted sugar with half a pound of flour. Rub four ounces of fresh butter into this, and make it into paste by stirring into it the white of an egg beaten up with a little cold water. Roll this pastry out, spread the almond paste upon it, and stamp the two together into fancy shapes of any size. Brush over with white of egg, and sprinkle chopped almonds thickly over the cakes. Shake a little sugar on the top of them. Put the cakes on a buttered baking-sheet, and bake in a moderately-heated oven. When done, the coating of almonds should be of a light-fawn colour. Remove the cakes carefully from the baking-sheet, and pile them in a pyramid upon a napkin. If liked, they can be ornamented with bright-coloured jelly of any kind. Probable cost. 1s. 6d. per pound.
This is a straightforward almond-paste-on-shortcrust biscuit, but it is built on an ingredient that is no longer sold as food in most countries and cannot be treated as interchangeable with the almonds you can buy.
- The bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and moistened, which is what pounding them into a wet egg-white paste does. Three or four bitter almonds against four ounces of sweet is a common Victorian proportion for flavour, but the strength of individual kernels varies, and baking in the "moderately-heated oven" the recipe calls for cannot be relied on to drive off the whole of it.
- Not the same as the tin marked "bitter almond"Modern bitter almond essence and commercial almond extract are benzaldehyde, with the cyanogenic compounds removed or never present. Substituting extract is a different recipe, not this one; if you want these biscuits, use a current almond-pastry recipe.
- Sale of the raw nut is restrictedRaw bitter almonds are not sold as a food in the United States, and EU and UK rules limit hydrocyanic acid in foodstuffs. If a bag turns up at a market, or from ornamental apricot or peach kernels, it is not a baking ingredient.
- The rest of the method is unremarkableThere is nothing else here that needs a warning: it is a rubbed-in shortcrust with an almond layer stamped on top, egg-washed and sugared. The hazard is confined to one ingredient, and it is not one that can be measured safely by eye.
- "Probable cost, 1s. 6d. per pound"The book costed its entries so a cook could price a dish. Ground almonds were the expensive element here, at four ounces to half a pound of flour.
Bitter almonds were a standard flavouring in nineteenth-century British and French confectionery, used in the same spirit as vanilla or lemon peel: a few pounded into a batch of ratafias, macaroons, blancmange or almond paste gave the intense marzipan note that sweet almonds alone do not have. The small bitter-almond biscuit called a ratafia takes its name from the bitter-almond liqueur. Their danger was known — Victorian toxicology texts and coroners' reports discuss almond-flavoured poisonings, and essence of bitter almonds (prussic acid included) appears in period pharmacopoeias — but the quantities in cookery were small enough that the practice continued until synthetic benzaldehyde made the real kernel unnecessary. "Royal" here is doing what it usually does in Victorian cookbook titles: signalling a richer, prettier version of a plain thing, in this case shortcrust dressed with almond paste, egg wash and jelly and piled on a folded napkin for the table.