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Turin Cakes
Blanch two ounces of sweet almonds and four bitter ones, and pound them to a paste with the white of an egg. Beat the yolks of five fresh eggs, and work in with them gradually the almond paste and eight ounces of powdered white sugar. When these ingredients are well beaten, add an ounce of potato-flour, two ounces of fine flour, and the well-whisked whites of the eggs. Pour the preparation into buttered and sugared tartlet-tins, and bake in a moderate oven. Time to bake, about half an hour, according to size. Probable cost, 1s. 2d. for this quantity.
The structure here is an almond sponge baked in small tins, but the ingredient list includes bitter almonds, which is why the recipe cannot be reproduced as printed.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding to a paste with egg white does. Their sale for eating is restricted or prohibited in a number of countries, including the United States, for that reason.
- The quantity is not reassuringFour bitter almonds is a small dose relative to the toxic range for an adult, but this batter is divided among tartlet tins of unstated size and eaten by unknown numbers of people, including possibly children, for whom the margin is much narrower. There is no way to portion the alkaloid evenly through a beaten batter.
- Baking does not make it safeHeat drives off some hydrogen cyanide and deactivates some enzyme activity, but a half-hour bake in a domestic oven is not a controlled detoxification step and cannot be relied on. Commercial bitter-almond products are processed specifically to remove the compound.
- Do not simply leave them out and carry onThe bitter almonds were the flavouring, not a garnish, so omitting them changes the cake rather than fixing the recipe. If you want this style of small almond sponge, use a current recipe written for sweet almonds and a measured almond extract.
- Why the rest of the page still reads oddlyPotato-flour is potato starch, sold as such today; "fine flour" is plain white flour; and "powdered white sugar" in period usage generally means finely ground granulated rather than modern icing sugar with its cornstarch. The costing in shillings and pence dates the entry rather than helping with it.
Bitter almonds were a standard flavouring in nineteenth-century European confectionery, used in small numbers alongside sweet almonds to give the intense marzipan note that we now get from almond extract or benzaldehyde. Cassell's, compiled in London in the 1870s and reissued for decades afterwards, prints them without comment in its cake and pudding entries, which suggests how ordinary they were on a grocer's shelf; the toxicology of amygdalin was understood by chemists of the period, but the culinary tradition ran ahead of the regulation. The name "Turin Cakes" is one of many Victorian recipe titles taken from Italian and French cities, a common way for compilers to signal fashionable continental cookery to English households; the potato starch here helps keep the crumb tender and short.