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Spanish Cakes
Blanch four ounces of sweet almonds and six or seven bitter ones, and pound them to paste with orange-flower water. Mix with them six ounces of powdered and sifted sugar, half a pound of dried flour, and a quarter of an ounce of powdered cinnamon. Break six eggs, free them from specks, and whisk them thoroughly. Put them into a chocolate mill, and add gradually the dry ingredients, together with two table-spoonfuls of rose-water and two table-spoonfuls of light wine. Mill the mixture between every addition, and for some time after all additions have been made, and till the batter is very light. Butter a pan, and bake the cake in a slow oven. Probable cost, 2s. for a cake this size.
This is a nineteenth-century almond sponge, and the problem is in the first line. The bitter almonds are not a flavouring quirk to be scaled down or worked around.
- Bitter almonds are the reason to stopBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding to a paste with orange-flower water accomplishes. The book treats six or seven as a routine seasoning; they are not food, and their sale for eating is prohibited in the United States and restricted elsewhere.
- Baking does not make it safeSome hydrogen cyanide is volatile and driven off by heat, but a slow oven in a covered mass of batter is not a reliable way to remove it, and nothing in the method lets you know how much remains.
- Almond extract is not the same thingModern almond flavouring is benzaldehyde, the aromatic compound bitter almonds were valued for, without the cyanogenic glycoside. It is the reason a current recipe should be used instead of this one.
- Other period terms, for reading the textA chocolate mill is a tall lidded pot with a notched wooden stirring rod worked between the palms, used here for the whisking and aerating a stand mixer would now do. "Dried flour" is flour warmed in a low oven to drive off moisture, a step often called for in period baking. "Light wine" is presumably a thin table wine, and the cost of 2s. is a Victorian retail estimate, not a measurement.
- Pan and quantity are unspecifiedThe recipe never states the pan size, the depth, or the baking time, and "a cake this size" refers to nothing given in the text. Even setting the almonds aside, there is not enough information here to bake it as written.
This sits among a run of almond confections descending from the European tradition of marchpane and almond-paste baking, in which Spain and Portugal, with their long-established use of almonds, sugar and flower waters, had a considerable reputation. The combination of orange-flower water, rose-water and cinnamon is characteristic of that style, and "Spanish" in Victorian cookery books may signal the perfumed almond manner rather than any particular Spanish recipe. Bitter almonds were sold by grocers and chemists through the nineteenth century and used in small numbers to sharpen the flavour of sweet almonds, much as a few drops of extract are used now; the toxicity of amygdalin was understood by chemists of the period, yet the culinary literature carried on recommending them for decades, and it was twentieth-century regulation that eventually removed them from the domestic pantry.