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Almond Pudding, Baked
INGREDIENTS. 1/4 lb. of almonds, 4 bitter ones, 1 glass of sherry, 4 eggs, the rind and juice of 1/3 lemon, 3 oz. of butter, 1 pint of milk, 2 oz. of bread-crumbs, 2 tablespoonfuls of sugar. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 6d.
Blanch and pound the almonds to a smooth paste with the water; mix these with the butter, which should be melted; beat the eggs, grate the lemon-rind, and strain the juice; add these with the milk, sugar and wine to the other ingredients and stir them well together. When well mixed, put ALMOND SOUP. it into a pie-dish lined with puff-paste and bake for hour.
TIME. to hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
This is a Victorian baked almond custard in a puff-paste case, and it turns on an ingredient that is no longer sold or used in British and American kitchens.
- The bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding to a paste does. Victorian cooks used them by the twos and fours as a flavouring; unprocessed bitter almonds are now banned from retail sale in the United States and restricted elsewhere for that reason.
- No cooking step removes itNo cooking step can be relied on -- The cyanide precursor is liberated during pounding and mixing, well before the pudding sees the oven. Hydrogen cyanide is volatile and some will be driven off in baking, but not predictably. The straightforward adjustment is to omit the bitter almonds.
- Not the same as almond extractCommercial bitter almond flavouring and modern almond extract are benzaldehyde-based and cyanide-free. They are not a like-for-like substitution instruction here — if you want a baked almond pudding, work from a current recipe rather than adapting this one.
- The almond quantity is incompleteThe ingredient list opens with a weight of almonds that has lost its fraction, so the proportion of nuts to the pint of milk and four eggs cannot be recovered from the text as printed.
- Water appears in the method onlyThe instruction to pound the almonds "with the water" refers to a small quantity of water — usually a spoonful or two — added to stop pounded almonds oiling. It is not listed among the ingredients.
- Average costOne shilling and sixpence was a real expense in the 1860s, reflecting the price of imported almonds and a glass of sherry. Cost figures like this appear throughout Beeton and were part of the book's appeal to households budgeting carefully.
- Baking timeBoth the method and the TIME line have lost their figures, leaving only "hour." The original duration is not recoverable here.
Baked almond puddings run through English cookery from the seventeenth century onward, when ground almonds stood in for cream and thickened everything from tarts to pottages, and they survived into the Victorian repertoire as a rich, sherry-scented custard baked in a lined dish. The habit of adding a few bitter almonds to a larger quantity of sweet ones was standard practice for centuries: the bitter kernel carried the intense marzipan aroma that sweet almonds lack, and cookery writers of Beeton's generation specified them casually, by the piece, with no warning attached. The toxicity of amygdalin was understood by chemists well before 1861, but the doses involved were small and the risk was not part of household knowledge; only in the twentieth century did regulation catch up and synthetic benzaldehyde flavourings take over much of the job, though bitter almond and stone-fruit kernel flavourings persist in several cuisines and confections. The entry also shows how Beeton's book was assembled — alphabetical, costed to the penny, and marked "seasonable at any time" because every ingredient in it could be bought dry or imported.