Orgeat
Make a syrup of one pound sugar to one pint water. Put it aside till cold. To five pounds sugar put one gill rose-water and two tablespoonfuls essence of bitter almonds.--Mrs. I. H.
This is a bare-bones syrup formula of the kind written down for someone who already knew what orgeat was. Two things stand in the way of making it: the flavouring called for, and the arithmetic.
- The flavouring is the problem"Essence of bitter almonds" could mean anything from an alcoholic dilution to the distilled volatile oil itself, and the stronger preparations carry hydrocyanic (prussic) acid. Two tablespoonfuls of an undiluted bitter almond oil would not be a flavouring quantity; such preparations were recognised poisons in the nineteenth century. Since the page does not say which strength is meant, do not attempt it.
- Modern almond extract is not the same thingWhat sells today as almond extract is benzaldehyde in alcohol, with the cyanide removed or never present. Its strength bears no fixed relation to whatever the recipe's "essence" was, so the quantities here give no useful guidance either way. If you want almond syrup, use a current recipe.
- The proportions do not resolveThe first sentence gives a syrup of one pound sugar to one pint water. The second jumps to five pounds sugar without saying whether that is five pounds of dry sugar, or the syrup made from it, or how much water goes with it. There is no honest conversion to offer here — the instruction assumes knowledge the page does not supply.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. Rose-water at that strength was normal in Victorian confectionery; commercial rose-water today varies enormously in potency, from delicate to soapy.
- Why the syrup is cooled firstThe recipe gives no reason, but adding aromatics to cold syrup limits loss of volatile oils, and cooling before flavouring remains standard practice for flavoured syrups.
Orgeat takes its name, by way of French, from Latin hordeum, barley: the original drink was a barley water, and almonds crept in during the medieval period until they displaced the grain entirely and left only the name behind. By the nineteenth century orgeat meant a sweet almond syrup, thinned with water for a summer drink, spooned into wine cups and punches, or used to flavour ices and blancmange — the ancestor of the orgeat that later turned up in tiki bar mai tais. Bitter almond essence was the standard shortcut to a strong almond note, and receipts like this one, contributed under the initials "Mrs. I. H.", called for it without comment. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from some 250 contributors, which is why its measurements are so often shorthand between people who already cooked alike.