Almond Paste
Half a pound of blanched and ground almonds, the yolks of two eggs, the juice of half a lemon, and a few drops of almond flavoring. Mix together well, knead with the hands until the mixture is smooth and pliable and will mold without splitting. Very good as a filling for dates or prunes or made into small balls and rolled in grated chocolate.
This is an uncooked marzipan bound with raw egg yolk and eaten as-is, which places it outside what a modern kitchen should attempt. The notes below explain the problem and a few things worth knowing about the recipe itself.
- Raw yolk, never heatedThe two egg yolks are the only binder and the paste is never cooked at any stage — it is kneaded, molded, and eaten. Salmonella in a contaminated yolk is not addressed by any step here, and there is no sugar syrup, acid or alcohol at a level that would control it. The half lemon is for flavour and pliability, not preservation.
- It is meant to sit aroundStorage -- The recipe says nothing about how long the finished paste was kept, but a moist, protein-rich paste held at room temperature is a growth medium, and the risk compounds with every hour. If you want marzipan, use a current recipe with a cooked sugar syrup or pasteurized egg product.
- There is no sugar in itWorth noticing, because it is unusual. Commercial almond paste is roughly equal parts almonds and sugar; this is almonds, yolk and lemon only, which is why it needs the eggs to hold together at all. It would have tasted markedly less sweet than anything sold as marzipan today.
- "Ground almonds" means fine, not meal"Ground almonds" -- The recipe specifies blanched almonds, so the skins are off already; how finely they were ground is not stated, though a fine grind kneads smoother and skin-on meal would speckle the paste.
- Almond flavoringThe "few drops" would have been an almond extract; such flavorings get their character from benzaldehyde, which in older products often came from bitter almond oil rather than a synthetic source. Older household recipes sometimes reached for bitter almonds or their oil for the same effect; that is a separate hazard and not something to substitute in.
- YieldHalf a pound of almonds with two yolks and a little lemon juice makes roughly ten ounces of paste — enough for a few dozen stuffed dates, or a similar number of small balls.
Almond paste reached American home cooks through the European marzipan tradition, generally traced to the confectioners of the Mediterranean and later the sugar-working kitchens of Germany and the Low Countries, where ground almonds and sugar were pounded into a modelling material for fruits, animals and lettered subtleties. What appears here is the thrifty domestic descendant: no sugar boiling, no marble slab, just a bowl and a pair of hands. Stuffed dates and prunes appear to have been a fixture of American candy chapters from around the turn of the twentieth century, sitting in the same territory as fudge and penuche or a party or a gift box without a candy thermometer or a copper pan. The use of raw yolk as the binder is characteristic of the period, when uncooked eggs went unremarked into everything from eggnog to salad dressing....