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VERMICELLI PUDDING (a German recipe)
Take a pint of milk, and boil it with six ounces of butter; throw in at the moment of boiling three ounces of vermicelli, and stir till it thickens and no longer adheres to the sides of the pan. Take the preparation off the fire, and when cool stir in two ounces of powdered sugar, an ounce of powdered almonds, including four bitter ones, the grated peel of half a lemon, a little spice, if liked, and the yolks of six eggs; then add the whites of the eggs whisked to snow. Boil the pudding briskly for an hour in a well-buttered mould. Serve with a fruit or wine sauce.
The pudding itself is a straightforward steamed vermicelli custard, but one ingredient in the list puts it out of reach: the four bitter almonds.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the almond's own enzymes convert to hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and moistened — exactly what happens when they are powdered and stirred into the milk mixture. Four nuts divided among several portions is a small dose for an adult, though children are markedly more susceptible to cyanide.
- Heat does not make it safeThe recipe adds the almonds off the fire, so the enzyme acts on the raw mixture before any further cooking. Heat destroys the enzyme and hydrogen cyanide is volatile, so much of it would be driven off during the hour's boiling, but there is no way to know how much remains in a sealed mould. Cooking should not be relied on as a detoxification step.
- You cannot legally buy them anywayUnprocessed bitter almonds are not sold for food in the United States and their sale is restricted in the UK and EU. What a nineteenth-century cook could buy as "bitter almonds" is no longer a retail grocery item, which is itself the clearest signal about the ingredient.
- The old baking almond-flavour conventionVictorian recipes reached for bitter almonds the way a modern one reaches for a bottle of extract, and they appear casually in puddings, ratafias and macaroons throughout books of this period. Their frequency in the sources is not evidence that the practice was safe; the toxicity of prussic acid was already known, and small quantities were simply tolerated.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for a steamed vermicelli or noodle pudding rather than adapting this one.
The recipe is headed "a German recipe," and it is recognisably in the family of German and Austrian sweet noodle puddings (Nudelauflauf) — enriched pasta bound with egg yolks, lightened with whisked whites and steamed or baked, then served with a fruit or wine sauce. Sweetened pasta puddings were common across central Europe and appear in Jewish cooking as kugel, and English compilers of the later nineteenth century reprinted continental puddings freely. The bitter almonds belong to the same period habit: before commercial flavouring extracts were widely available, cooks got the strong marzipan note by including a few bitter almonds among the sweet ones, a practice found across European baking literature and largely displaced by bottled almond essence, though bitter-almond flavouring persisted in parts of Europe well into the twentieth century.