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Almond Cup Pudding
4 ounces of sweet almonds 2 ounces bitter almonds 2 ounces of butter 1 tablespoon cream 1 1/2 ounces flour 1 ounce of sugar Blanch the almonds, and pass them through a nut mill; then pound them well in a mortar for ten minutes; add the butter--beaten to a cream--and the cream and sugar. Then add the flour slowly, stirring all the time. Grease some small tins, and half fill them, and put into a quick oven for about half an hour. Serve with brandy sauce if desired.
The problem here is not technique but a single ingredient. Bitter almonds were a standard flavouring in Victorian and Edwardian baking; they are not sold as food today, and for good reason.
- Bitter almonds are the hinge, and they are toxicBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the body converts to hydrogen cyanide. Two ounces is roughly 40 to 50 kernels, well into the range associated with serious poisoning in an adult and far beyond it for a child. Baking does not reliably destroy it, and this pudding is divided into small individual tins, so the dose per serving is unpredictable.
- They are not the same thing as almond extractModern almond extract is either synthetic benzaldehyde or a commercially processed bitter-almond oil from which the cyanide precursors have been removed. Substituting extract by weight for whole bitter almonds is not a conversion anyone can make sensibly from this text, which is part of why the recipe cannot simply be adjusted.
- Nor are apricot or peach kernels a substituteRecipe collections sometimes suggest these as a stand-in for bitter almonds. They carry the same amygdalin and in some cases more of it. If you want an almond-scented steamed or baked pudding, use a current recipe.
- "Sweet almonds" is just almondsThe four ounces of sweet almonds are ordinary almonds, the kind sold everywhere. The recipe's whole distinction between sweet and bitter has vanished from the modern shelf because only one of the two is still a food.
- "A quick oven" for referenceIn books of this period a quick oven is generally taken to mean somewhere in the region of 400 to 450F, though the term was never standardised from book to book. Noted only so the original is legible, not as a working instruction for this dish.
- The vesselsThe recipe says only "small tins", half filled to allow for rise; individual moulds of the dariole or timbale sort would suit, and the quantity of batter would fill several of them, though the original gives no yield.
History: Bitter almonds were once a workaday flavouring rather than an exotic one: grocers sold them alongside sweet almonds, and they supplied the sharp marzipan note in ratafia biscuits, macaroons, almond puddings and blancmanges through the nineteenth century. The danger was known, and poisonings from almond flavourings were reported from time to time. Here the ground nuts, pounded in a mortar for a full ten minutes, do much of the work of the pudding, which is otherwise little more than flour, butter, cream and sugar. Regulation of bitter-almond oil for food use tightened through the twentieth century, and the whole kernels left the domestic market, taking recipes like this one with them.