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WAFFLES (a German recipe)
Mix one pound and a half of flour with the same quantity of clarified butter, add the yolks of twelve eggs one by one, then a little grated nutmeg, a few grains of salt, two handfuls of pounded almonds with a few bitter ones among them, four or five spoonfuls of yeast, nearly a pint of milk, and lastly the whites of the eggs beaten to snow. Mix and beat well together, then leave the mixture for two hours before proceeding further. Have ready the waffle-irons, heat them in the fire, and rub them over with butter; pour into them a ladleful of the batter, and bake of a fine yellow. The irons must be buttered each time before any batter is poured in. Strew pounded sugar and cinnamon over the waffles after they are done.
The problem is a single clause: "a few bitter ones among them." Bitter almonds are not a flavouring variant of sweet almonds but a distinct toxic seed, and their inclusion here is unmeasured.
- Bitter almonds are a cyanide sourceBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the enzyme emulsin converts to hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding into a wet batter does. The lethal dose for an adult is commonly put in the region of fifty nuts, and far fewer for a child; a "few" among two handfuls, in a batter divided into an unknown number of waffles, gives no control over what any one person eats.
- Baking does not make them safeSome of the volatile cyanide is driven off by heat, but a waffle iron cooks a thin batter for a couple of minutes and nothing in the method guarantees the loss. Nineteenth-century cooks used bitter almonds freely for their marzipan-like aroma; they are now restricted or banned for retail sale as food in the United States and tightly controlled elsewhere, and that is the reason.
- The rest of the formula is also out of scaleA pound and a half of flour against the same weight of clarified butter and twelve yolks is a rich, yeast-raised batter, quite unlike a modern quick waffle batter. Even setting the almonds aside, the proportions and the two-hour ferment need a tested modern recipe rather than adaptation of this one.
- Use a current recipeIf you want a yeast-raised almond waffle, work from a modern recipe using sweet almonds and, if you want the perfumed note, a measured almond extract. Do not attempt to substitute your way through the text above.
The book presents this as a German recipe, and it is recognisably one: Waffeln raised with yeast, enriched with clarified butter and egg yolks, and finished with cinnamon sugar were a familiar sweet of German and Austrian households, cooked between long-handled hinged irons heated in the fire, as the recipe itself directs. The irons themselves are far older than the book — patterned wafer and waffle irons survive from medieval Europe. The English word comes from Dutch wafel, and is usually traced to a Germanic root shared with wafer; the frequently repeated link to the honeycomb sense of that root is traditional rather than settled. The casual instruction to include "a few bitter ones among them" is a period detail: through the nineteenth century bitter almonds were an ordinary grocery item used for their intense marzipan aroma in puddings, ratafias and confectionery. The cyanogenic chemistry was in fact described in the 1830s, well before books of this kind, but restriction of retail sale came considerably later, and commercial almond flavouring shifted to benzaldehyde free from prussic acid.