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Crème De Noyeau
Pound together in a mortar one-fourth pound peach apricot, or bitter almond pits and pour over them one pint water and one-half gallon spirits of wine. Cork and stir and shake each day for eight days when add a syrup made of a pint of water to a pound of sugar. Strain off the kernels and let stand another week when bottle.
This is a nineteenth-century kernel liqueur, and the flavouring agent is the problem: it is built on a quarter pound of crushed stone-fruit kernels steeped in high-proof alcohol. The points below explain the terms and why the result should not be drunk.
- Why this one failsPeach, apricot and bitter almond kernels contain amygdalin, which enzymatic action in the crushed, wetted kernel converts to hydrogen cyanide. Pounding the pits in a mortar and steeping them wet with water and spirit for eight days is precisely the process that liberates it, and alcohol extracts and holds the resulting compounds in the finished bottle.
- The quantity is the issueA quarter pound of pits is a substantial dose concentrated into roughly half a gallon of drinkable spirit, then sweetened so the bitterness that would normally warn a drinker off is masked. Commercial noyau-style liqueurs and almond extracts today are generally made with the cyanogenic compounds removed or with benzaldehyde flavouring, which carries none of this risk.
- Spirits of wineNot wine. This is rectified ethanol, commonly around 90 to 95 percent alcohol by volume, sold by druggists in the period. The nearest modern equivalents are high-proof neutral grain spirits, where these are legally sold; it is not an ordinary bar ingredient.
- Peach apricotApparently a typographical slip for "peach, apricot" — the recipe offers three interchangeable kernel sources, all of which contain the same glycoside, in quantities that vary by fruit and variety.
- The syrupA pint of water to a pound of sugar is roughly equal weights of sugar and water, an ordinary simple syrup. The technique itself is unremarkable; it is what it is sweetening that is the difficulty.
- If you want the flavourBuy a current commercial crème de noyaux or use a tested modern amaretto recipe. There is no adjustment to the steeping time or kernel quantity here that we would put our name to.
Crème de noyau — noyau is simply French for the stone or pit of a fruit — belongs to a family of European cordials that made use of what was left after the flesh of peaches, apricots and cherries had been preserved. The kernel inside the stone carries a marzipan bitterness. Ratafias, noyaux and bitter-almond waters appear all through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century domestic manuals, and the toxicity of the kernels was not entirely unknown at the time; medical writers of the period recorded poisonings from almond flavourings and from laurel water, which works the same way. What changed is the chemistry: once amygdalin was isolated in the 1830s and the mechanism understood, commercial producers moved to kernel extracts stripped of the glycoside or to synthetic benzaldehyde.