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Almond Icing for Cakes
INGREDIENTS.-1 lb. of castor sugar, 1 lb. of sweet almonds, the whites of 4 eggs, a little rosewater. AVERAGE COST for a large cake, 1s. 7d.
Blanch the almonds and pound them to a paste with a little rosewater. Beat the whites of eggs to a stiff froth, mix them with the almonds, add the sugar and beat all together till quite smooth. Spread the mixture over the cake and put it into the oven to dry.
Almond Milk (for Invalids).
INGREDIENTS.-2 oz. of sweet almonds, 4 bitter seeds, 1 pint of milk, 1 pint of water, a little orange-flower water, sugar to taste.
AVERAGE Cost, 6d.
Blanch and pound the almonds and seeds with the orange-flower water to a smooth paste, rub this into the milk and water, strain, and sweeten according to taste.
Two entries run together here: an almond paste for covering cakes, and an almond milk for the sick. The icing is workable with modern equipment; the almond milk is not, and the reason is the "4 bitter seeds".
- The bitter seeds are the problem"Bitter seeds" means bitter almonds or the kernels of apricots and peaches, used in the period for their strong almond flavour. They contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding to a paste and stirring into liquid accomplishes. No heat step here destroys it.
- Why the invalid drink is the worst caseThe drinker may be a child or a weakened patient and the drink is served uncooked. Four kernels in two pints is a small quantity and not necessarily a dangerous dose, but the amount of amygdalin in any given kernel is unknown and the recipe has no margin built into it. Use a current recipe if you want almond milk; bitter almond flavour today comes as a distilled extract from which the cyanogenic compounds have been removed.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or caster sugar, finer than granulated and coarser than icing sugar. Granulated will not dissolve into the almond paste and leaves it gritty.
- "Sweet almonds" and blanchingOrdinary almonds. Cover with boiling water for a minute, slip the skins off, then dry them well — damp nuts turn oily under pounding. A food processor does the pounding, pulsed, with the rosewater added early to keep the paste from turning to butter.
- This is marzipan, not icingA pound of sugar to a pound of almonds bound with egg white is almond paste. Traditionally it goes onto the cake as an under-layer and royal icing goes over it; used alone it stays soft and ivory-coloured rather than setting white and hard.
- "Put it into the oven to dry"Not baking. The book gives no temperature. Use the lowest setting your oven holds, with the door ajar for half an hour or so, or simply leave the cake in a cool dry place for a day or two. Any real oven heat browns the almond oil and cracks the surface.
- Raw egg whiteFour whites go in uncooked and the drying stage will not pasteurise them. Use pasteurised whites, particularly if the cake is for anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised.
- YieldA pound of almonds and a pound of sugar with the whites makes something over 2 lb of paste, enough to cover the top and sides of an 8-9 inch round cake rolled about a quarter-inch thick. Four whites is generous; add them gradually and stop when the paste just holds together.
Almond paste under a hard white icing is the standard dress of the British celebration cake, and Beeton's proportions — equal weights of almonds and sugar, egg white to bind, rosewater to perfume — are close to the marzipan of medieval European confectionery, which reached England through the sugar and almond trade of the late Middle Ages. Rosewater and orange-flower water were the ordinary flavourings of English sweet cookery well into the nineteenth century, before vanilla became cheap and dominant. The almond milk beside it is older still in spirit: ground almonds beaten into water made a milk substitute for fast days when dairy was forbidden, and by Beeton's time it had settled into the sickroom as a bland, cooling drink. The four bitter kernels were there largely for flavour, though bitter almond also carried a medicinal reputation in the period, and it was a habit that Victorian pharmacy manuals were already warning about; modern food regulation restricts raw sale and the hydrocyanic content of extracts, though bitter almonds and apricot kernels remain obtainable in a number of jurisdictions.