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Almond Jumbles
Work 2 ounces of butter into half a pound of flour; then add 2 tablespoonfuls of sifted sugar, a little lemon juice, and 2 ounces of sweet and 4 or 5 bitter almonds, blanched and beaten to a paste with the white of an egg. Mix thoroughly, roll it out rather thin, cut into small round cakes, place them on well-oiled tins, and bake in a quick oven. Time to bake, ten minutes.
This is a plain rolled almond biscuit, but it depends on bitter almonds, which are not a food ingredient in modern terms. The notes below explain why the recipe cannot be followed and what the older measures mean.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed, wetted or chewed. That is exactly what this recipe does: blanches them, beats them to a paste with egg white and works them through the dough. Sale of raw bitter almonds for eating is banned or restricted in a number of countries for this reason.
- Ten minutes will not fix itBaking drives off some hydrogen cyanide, but a ten-minute bake in a thin biscuit is not a controlled detoxification, and the dose is not distributed evenly through the batch. A cook cannot know how much remains in any one cake. Use a current almond biscuit recipe instead.
- Why the book calls for themBitter almonds were the standard nineteenth-century source of strong almond flavour, the compound now sold as benzaldehyde in almond extract. Their presence here is a flavouring decision, not a structural one, but the recipe as written has no safe form and should be left as a historical document.
- The old measures, for readingHalf a pound of flour is about 225 g, or a little under 2 cups; 2 ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons. "Sifted sugar" in this period is usually taken to mean sugar sifted fine through a sieve, nearer today's caster sugar than icing sugar.
- "A quick oven"A quick oven is generally taken as roughly 400-425F (200-220C). The short bake time follows from that heat and from how thin the cakes are rolled.
- "Jumbles"The name covers a family of small, firm, sweet biscuits rather than a single shape. Earlier versions were rolled into ropes and knotted or coiled; this recipe simply cuts rounds.
Jumbles are among the oldest English sweet biscuits still in print, appearing in recipe collections from the sixteenth century onward, when the dough was often rolled into a rope and tied in a knot or coiled into a ring; the name is usually traced to that twisted form, though the derivation is not settled. Almond jumbles belong to a long tradition of using ground almonds as both flavour and body in small cakes, a habit inherited from medieval and early modern cookery, where almonds stood in for dairy on fast days. Combining sweet almonds with a few bitter ones was common in Victorian and Edwardian household books, which generally treated bitter almonds as a flavouring rather than as a hazard. The bottled extract that replaced them, along with tightening regulation of bitter almond sales through the twentieth century, is likely part of why recipes of this kind dropped out of later editions.