Almond Soup
2/3 cup almonds 6 bitter almonds 4 tablespoons cold water 1/8 teaspoon salt 3 cups White Stock III 1 small onion 3 stalks celery 3 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour 2 cups scalded milk 1 cup cream Salt and pepper Blanch, chop, and pound almonds in a mortar. Add gradually water and salt; then add stock, sliced onion, and celery, let simmer one hour, and rub through a sieve. Melt butter, add flour, and pour on gradually the hot liquor; then add milk, cream, and salt and pepper to taste. Serve with Mock Almonds.
The problem here is the second line of the ingredient list. Bitter almonds were a standard flavouring in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century kitchens and are not something to reproduce now.
- Bitter almonds are the reason to stopBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which enzymes in the crushed nut convert to hydrogen cyanide once the kernel is broken and wetted. Pounding six of them in a mortar with water, exactly as directed here, is the condition that releases it.
- The quantity is not trivialReported cyanide yields from raw bitter almonds vary widely with variety and freshness, and figures cited for a lethal adult dose are usually several dozen kernels, with far fewer for a small child. Six kernels divided among the servings this soup makes is a small amount per bowl, and hydrogen cyanide is volatile enough that an hour of simmering will drive off much of what is released. The objection is not that the dose is certainly dangerous but that the yield of an untested kernel cannot be known in advance.
- They are not sold as food hereRaw bitter almonds cannot legally be sold for eating in the United States, and their sale is restricted across much of Europe. What survives of the flavour in modern cooking is commercial bitter almond extract, which is processed to remove the cyanide, or synthetic benzaldehyde.
- If you want almond soupUse a current recipe. Nothing else in this formula is objectionable, but the bitter almonds are integral to it as written, and we are not going to publish an adjusted version.
- White Stock IIIA cross-reference to an earlier numbered stock in the same book, in this period usually a pale veal or veal-and-fowl stock, unbrowned so it does not colour the soup. If you meet the phrase elsewhere in the volume it means the same thing.
- Mock AlmondsAnother cross-reference, to a garnish rather than an ingredient; see the book's own entry for what it consists of.
Almond soups are old and widespread: pounded almonds thinned with stock or milk were a staple of medieval and early modern European cookery, valued partly because almond milk stood in for dairy on fast days. By the time this book was written the dish had become a genteel white soup of the sort served early in a long dinner, and the almonds were as much about texture and pale colour as flavour. A few bitter almonds added to sweet ones is a common period device for sharpening the flavour, and the combination turns up in blancmanges, macaroons and ratafias in nineteenth-century cookbooks. Regulation of the raw kernels followed in the twentieth century, and the flavour is now met mainly as processed extract or synthetic benzaldehyde.