Important: Safety Warning
This page calls for raw bitter almonds in preparations that are not cooked. Bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide; raw bitter almonds are toxic in small quantities and their sale for eating is restricted in many countries today.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Almond
There is no fruit that touches the fancy so quickly and at so many points as the almond. If we can- Almond not say that it is the most useful of fruits a title which it disputes with the apple-it is the most versatile and the most poetical. The very form of the almond is delightful, and there are phrases in which we liken to it things so diverse as the eyes and finger-nails of beautiful women. There is something startling to the imagination also in the knowledge that this fruit, so fine of shape, so sweet and soft to the palate, so soothing and medicinal in its influence, contains within itself the most potent and rapid of poisons-hydrocyanic acid. It is another striking fact that the almond blossoms before its leaves comes out. When "thro' wild March the throstle calls," "the sunlit almond blossom shakes" not only round the Queen's palace walls, but in thousands of gardens throughout the land; and it is one of the joys of early spring about London-indeed, all over England-to see this, about the earliest of the flowering shrubs, with its pink blossoms upon bare branches, suggesting images of hope in sorrow and triumph in desolation. Strange, too, that the almond is a peach and a nectarine at the same time. It is not only the parent of these fruit trees, but there are almond trees in which almonds will be found in a state of transition to peaches, and with both peaches and nectarines on the same branch. Another curious point is the caprice of the almond in bitterness. There are not only bitter almond trees, but a number of bitter almonds will be found growing on sweet almond trees, and no one can be absolutely certain whether the kernel he is about to taste will be sweet or bitter. To all this it is to be added that the almond goes to form the most tempting sweetmeats of children, who revel in nougat and macaroons, in hardbake, in sugared almonds or pralines and in the fond union of almonds and raisins, happy pairs of bride and bridegroom, entering into that rosy chamber of bliss the pearl-barred mouth of a red-lipped child.
The usefulness of the almond is wonderful. The physician knows this well. Mention has already been made of Aimona the most rapid of poisons derived from it-prussic acidwhich in weak doses holds a great place in the pharmacopœia. The almond provides an admirable salve for the skin, and either cures or relieves a variety of cutaneous diseases. A few almonds eaten after dinner have been known to give instant relief from heartburn. Almond paste or emulsion forms a first-rate medium for the combination and presentation of drugs ; and almond milkthat is, almond triturated with sugar and water-has many of the characteristics of animal milk, and forms a very soothing beverage in fever, as well as a pleasant summer drink.
To the perfumer the almond is a perfect treasure. Its oil is the basis of Rowland's Kalydor, the still more celebrated Macassar Oil, and Gowland's Lotion; the flour which remains after the oil has been extracted goes to form what the French beautifiers call Pâte d'Amandes ; and the husks are so rich in alkaline matter that their yield is turned into soap.
To the cook it is not less valuable; for the almond cream will smooth and improve some of his white soups, and in the preparation of his sweet entremets its uses are illimitable, whether preserved whole and employed in decoration, or pounded and lost to view to reappear in flavour. Blancmanger was originally a white chicken soup with a cream of almonds added ; it is now a sweet entremet of almond cream, without soup or chicken, but isinglass instead, and allowed to cool in a mould. So it was that almond milk was originally orgeate-a barley water. Almonds were added to it to enrich it; and they have been found so allsufficient by themselves that they are used alone without barley, and the drink is still called orgeate. For most of the good things of which almonds are the chief ingredient, it is best to go the confectioner; for those in which they play a subordinate part, or appear under new names-as orgeate and blancmanger-the receipts will be found under Almond special headings. Here it must be enough to describe almond cream or milk, and the almond pudding.
Almond Milk, Cream, or Paste. - Sweet almonds are brayed in a mortar with a slight sprinkling of bitter ones, and from time to time, to prevent oiling, with a few drops of cold water. According to the quantity of water, this is either a paste, a cream, or milk. Add sugar or syrup to taste. For orgeate, or almond milk to drink, it used to be the rule to let the water and pounded almonds infuse for several hours on cinders or on the angle of the stove. Now it is considered enough to let it rest in a cool place for about a couple of hours. When the flavour of the almonds is extracted, the infusion is to be strained through a napkin, to have a dash of orange-flower water added to it, to be diluted to the thinness of a drink, and to be kept in ice or in a very cold place, lest it should like milk turn sour. It is very refreshing in fever or in hot weather; and is considered especially good for orators and all who have to use the throat much. In his great speech of 1860, when he lost his voice, and the country was kept waiting a week for his famous wine budget, Mr. Gladstone might be seen drinking small glassfuls of what had all the appearance of almond cream-though whether it was so or not I cannot say.
Almond Cream Sauce. - Blanch an ounce of Jordan almonds and four or five bitter ones. Pound them with four ounces of sugar and a tablespoonful of orange-flower water, and then add a gill of cream and two raw yolks of eggs. Take this to the angle of the stove in a saucepan or enamelled bowl; whisk it into a thickish froth, and it will become a very pretty sauce for puddings.
Almond Pudding. - Take half a pound of sweet almonds with half a dozen bitter ones, and having blanched them, bray them to a smooth paste with a little orange-flower water to prevent their oiling. Mix this gradually with the beaten yolks of eight and the whites of four eggs, with Ambigu four ounces of clarified butter, and with sugar to tastesay from six to eight ounces. The next step is not necessary, but it is advisable in order to secure the consistency of the pudding throughout. Put it into a saucepan and stir it constantly over a slow fire till it begins to thicken. Then add to it a wineglassful of sherry or a liqueur-glass of noyau-some say curaçoa. Next pour it either into a pie-dish which has been lined with a thin puff paste, or into one which has been rubbed with oil of sweet almonds, in order that it may afterwards turn out, and put it into the oven to bake for half an hour. Serve it with a fruit syrup. The best almonds are those called the tender-shelledthe best of these the Jordan-and the best Jordan almonds come not from the Jordan but from Malaga. There is no doubt, however, that this variety came originally from Palestine. Every reader of the Bible must know that the Hebrews rejoiced in their almond trees. Aaron's rod that blossomed yielded almonds, and Hebrew poetry abounds in allusions to the almond. Needless to say, that almonds go admirably after dinner with the wine. They may be pleasantly varied by a little roasting. Plutarch describes how a Roman physician, who was expected by his host to drink largely, warded off drunkenness by eating bitter almonds between his cups.
Three working recipes sit inside this essay — almond milk, an almond cream sauce and an almond pudding — and every one of them is built on bitter almonds, which is what puts the page out of reach. The notes below explain the terms and the hazard rather than offering a rewrite.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almond kernels contain amygdalin, which the almond's own enzyme converts to hydrocyanic acid (cyanide) as soon as the kernel is crushed and wetted — exactly what braying in a mortar with water does. Kettner cheerfully names the poison in the essay above and then calls for four to six kernels in each of the two measured dishes.
- The dose is not trivially smallRaw bitter almond kernels are commonly cited at roughly 4-9 mg of releasable cyanide each. Half a dozen in a pudding shared out is unlikely to kill an adult, but it sits in the range that has caused poisonings in children, and the recipes give no upper bound: the almond milk is scaled only by "a slight sprinkling."
- You cannot buy them anywayUnprocessed bitter almonds cannot legally be sold for food in the United States and are restricted in the UK and EU. What replaced them commercially is almond extract, which supplies benzaldehyde — the flavour compound — without the glycoside.
- The almonds are also unpredictableThe essay itself notes that bitter kernels turn up at random on sweet trees and that "no one can be absolutely certain" which he is tasting. That is precisely why a home cook cannot control the dose here.
- The cream sauce is never brought to temperatureTwo raw yolks and a gill of cream are whisked to a froth at "the angle of the stove" — the cool corner of a range top, deliberately gentle. A frothed sabayon held there does not reliably reach a temperature that pasteurises egg.
- And the orgeat is held warm for hoursAnd the older orgeat method held it warm for hours -- Kettner reports that it "used to be the rule" to infuse pounded almonds and water on cinders or the warm edge of the stove for several hours, which parks a high-protein liquid in the bacterial growth range with no acidity to protect it. He then supersedes that with a couple of hours in a cool place. The instruction to ice it "lest it should like milk turn sour" points at the same problem.
- Terms, for reading the pageTo bray is to pound in a mortar; a gill is a quarter of a pint, about 5 imperial fluid ounces (roughly 140 ml); Jordan almonds here mean the long tender-shelled Malaga sweet almonds, not sugar-shelled confectionery; noyau is a kernel-flavoured liqueur, itself traditionally made from stone fruit pits; isinglass, in the blancmanger aside, is a fish-derived gelatine.
- If you want the dishAlmond milk, almond sabayon and baked almond pudding all survive in current form. Use a modern recipe with sweet almonds and almond extract.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877) was written by E. S. Dallas, a journalist, under the name of Auguste Kettner, the Soho restaurateur whose house Dallas frequented, and this entry shows the book's habit of running an essay and a receipt together under one alphabetical heading. The historical claims embedded in it are largely sound: almond milk really was a staple of medieval and Renaissance European kitchens, where it stood in for dairy on the many fast days of the church calendar and kept better than milk in a warm larder, and blancmanger really did begin as a pale dish of pounded almonds with capon before shedding its meat and becoming a set sweet. So did orgeat, whose name descends from Latin hordeum, barley, long after the barley itself dropped out in favour of almonds alone. The bitter almond that makes these recipes unusable was, for centuries, simply the strongest almond flavouring available — the industrial synthesis of benzaldehyde in the later nineteenth century, and the growing chemical understanding of prussic acid that Dallas alludes to, are often said to have contributed to its retreat from the kitchen shelf, though the causes are not well documented. The Gladstone anecdote is offered by the author himself as hearsay, and the Plutarch story about warding off drunkenness with bitter almonds should be read as ancient lore rather than pharmacology.