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Cherry Ice Cream
Make the foundation ice cream or custard (given in Introductory Recipes), flavouring with cherry syrup, cordial, spiced cherries, Maraschino, or other form of preserved cherries. Use a few of the crushed kernels to flavour additionally.
The ice cream base is unremarkable, but the final sentence is not: crushed cherry kernels are a genuine poisoning hazard in an uncooked, unmeasured preparation.
- The kernels are the problemThe seed inside a cherry stone contains amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and moistened. Crushing is precisely what liberates it, and a cold custard never heats enough to drive anything off.
- No quantity, no control"A few of the crushed kernels" gives no weight, no count and no fruit variety, and amygdalin content varies widely between cherry types and between individual stones. There is no way to know the dose in a given batch, and the ice cream is then divided unevenly among servings.
- Children and small portionsIce cream is a dish children eat freely, and body weight is what determines how much cyanide matters. This is the worst possible vehicle for an unmeasured kernel infusion.
- Why the period thought it safeWhy the period used them -- Stone kernels, bitter almonds and noyau appear frequently in nineteenth-century printed recipes for the almond note in cherry, apricot and peach dishes, generally in small amounts and often in cooked preparations. The toxicity of prussic acid from bitter kernels was known in the period, yet the practice persisted in print for decades.
- The commercial flavour todayThe almond-cherry character that kernels were used for is now supplied by benzaldehyde-based flavourings and by maraschino liqueur, which is distilled from marasca cherries including the stones; commercial spirits of this kind are subject to regulated limits on residual hydrogen cyanide, so the dose is controlled in a way that a home cook cracking stones cannot match.
- If you want cherry ice creamUse a current recipe for a custard or Philadelphia-style base with cherry purée, syrup or maraschino, and leave the stones out entirely.
This entry is typical of the single-fruit compendiums of the period, in which writers organised whole books by ingredient and cross-referenced a handful of "introductory recipes" — a foundation custard, a plain syrup, a boiled icing — rather than repeating them. The cherry chapter assumes a household able to freeze a custard at home and with a supply of preserved cherries in some form: brandied, spiced, in syrup, or as maraschino, the Dalmatian liqueur made from marasca cherries, which had become a fashionable flavouring in American and British kitchens by the late nineteenth century. The instruction to crack a few stones for extra flavour reflects a long-standing practice, traceable through ratafia and noyau, of using stone-fruit kernels for the bitter-almond note; it appears in respectable cookbooks into the twentieth century.