Home › Baked Puddings › Jewish Almond Pudding
Jewish Almond Pudding
Put 4 ounces of sweet almonds, and 3 bitter ones, into a saucepan of cold water. Heat it gradually, and when too hot to bear the fingers, put the almonds into a basin, slip off the skins, and throw them at once into cold water. Dry them well, and pound them in a mortar until they form a smooth paste; drop 1 teaspoonful of cold water over them two or three times to prevent them oiling. Mix with them 4 ounces of powdered loaf sugar, and add 2 tablespoonfuls of rose-water, together with the yolks of 4, and the whites of 3, eggs well beaten. Stir briskly for ten minutes, pour into a well-oiled mould, and bake in a quick oven. Turn the pudding out of the dish before serving, and pour round it a thick syrup, flavored with the rind and juice of 1 lemon, and colored with cochineal. Time, half an hour to bake. Stewed apples may be added with the almond when making the batter.
This is a baked almond custard of a type common in nineteenth-century English-Jewish cookery, but it is built on an ingredient that is no longer sold for eating and cannot be substituted by guesswork.
- Bitter almondsThe three bitter almonds are not a flavouring variant of sweet almonds. They contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding in a mortar with water does. Raw bitter almonds are barred from general sale in the United States and restricted elsewhere for this reason, and this pudding calls for them raw-ground into an uncooked-tasting paste before a short bake.
- Why the count mattersOld books specify bitter almonds by the individual nut rather than by weight. Amygdalin content varies from nut to nut, so a fixed count gives no reliable indication of what is actually in the bowl. Use a current almond pudding recipe instead.
- What the bitter almond was doingIt supplied benzaldehyde, the sharp marzipan note that plain sweet almonds lack. Almond extract sold today is either synthetic benzaldehyde or bitter-almond oil from which the prussic acid has been removed.
- Loaf sugarSugar was sold as a hard cone and broken and pounded at home; "powdered loaf sugar" is simply fine white sugar, closest to today's caster.
- Rose-waterTwo tablespoonfuls is a large amount by modern standards. Rose-water strength varied then and varies now, so the quantity cannot be carried straight across to a modern bottle.
- CochinealThe pink syrup was coloured with carmine extracted from scale insects. It is still a legal food colour, listed as carmine or E120, though it is not vegetarian and is a recognised allergen for a small number of people.
- Oiling the almondsThe drops of cold water during pounding keep the paste from breaking and weeping oil. This is the one piece of technique in the recipe worth carrying forward to any hand-ground nut paste.
- The mouldThe recipe specifies only a well-oiled mould, with no material given and no water bath mentioned. The pudding was expected to hold its shape when turned out.
Almond puddings and cakes appear constantly in Anglo-Jewish cookery of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and for a practical reason: ground almonds and eggs make a rich baked sweet with no flour, no butter and no milk, so the same dish serves at Passover and after a meat meal. Recipes of this family are usually connected with the almond "maccaroon" and marchpane tradition long established in English kitchens, and Jewish cookbooks in English — The Jewish Manual (1846), published anonymously and conventionally attributed to Judith Montefiore, is the usual starting point cited for the genre — helped fix them in print. The bitter almond, the rose-water and the cochineal-tinted lemon syrup all point to the older, more perfumed style of confectionery, before vanilla and chocolate crowded the field. Compilations of this kind commonly absorbed such recipes from earlier household books, which is why the instructions still assume a mortar, a sugar loaf and an oven judged by hand rather than by dial.