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SNOWBALLS (a German recipe)
Take a pint and a half of milk, and set it on the fire. When it boils, throw in a few grated bitter almonds, a quarter of a pound of fresh butter, and two ounces of sugar. Continue stirring, and pour in eight or nine spoonfuls of flour mixed in a little milk, and keep stirring till it has become a stiff mass which falls from the spoon and saucepan. Take out the preparation, and have ready seven or eight eggs beat up, which add to the paste. Work all well together, butter a baking-tin, and with a spoon drop the paste on it in little balls, which will greatly swell in the baking. Put them in a moderately-heated oven, and when done strew them thickly with sugar.
This is a choux-type paste baked into puffs, but the flavouring is the problem: bitter almonds, in an unmeasured quantity, added raw to the milk. That single ingredient puts the recipe out of reach.
- Bitter almonds are the hinge, and not in a good wayBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed, grated or moistened — exactly what this recipe does, grating them into hot milk. Their sale for eating is prohibited in the United States and restricted elsewhere for this reason.
- "A few" is not a doseThe toxic load of bitter almonds varies with variety, size and freshness, and the recipe gives no weight or count. There is no way to read "a few grated bitter almonds" as a controlled quantity, and heating in milk does not reliably drive off the cyanide once it has formed.
- Sweet almonds are not a substitute in kindBitter almonds were used here as a flavouring, the role now filled by modern almond essence. Swapping in sweet almonds changes the dish entirely; if you want these puffs, use a current recipe for choux buns with a modern almond flavouring rather than adapting this one.
- What the method actually isBoiling liquid, butter and flour cooked to a paste that leaves the pan, then beaten with eggs, is standard choux. The high egg count relative to flour explains the "great swelling" — steam, not a raising agent, does the work.
- The units, for reading purposesAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so a pint and a half is about 850 ml. "Eight or nine spoonfuls of flour" is a kitchen-spoon measure with no fixed volume, which is one more reason this text reads as a memorandum for a cook who already knew the dish.
- "A moderately-heated oven"Period ovens were not calibrated and such terms were not standardised; 'moderate' is conventionally rendered today as somewhere in the region of 350F, but that is an approximation, not a reading of the text. Noted for context only — the recipe should not be baked as written.
The book marks this as German, and the name is a straight translation: Schneeballen, a term used across German-speaking Europe for several quite different sweets, from the shredded fried pastry balls of Rothenburg ob der Tauber to sugar-dusted baked puffs like these. Bitter almonds were a common flavouring in nineteenth-century German, Austrian and English baking, and the danger was known — prussic acid was understood to be present — though period books more often advised sparing use than avoidance. Bitter almond flavouring in domestic kitchens was later displaced by proprietary almond essences and by benzaldehyde, which delivers the taste without the amygdalin. Recipes like this one survive as a record of a flavour profile that modern cooks reach by an entirely different route.