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Almond Puddings, Small
INGREDIENTS for sufficient for 6 persons-lb. of sweet almonds, 6 bitter ones, 1/4 lb. of butter, 3 eggs, 2 tablespoonfuls of sifted sugar, 2 tablespoonfuls of cream or milk, 1 tablespoonful of brandy. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 10d.
Blanch and pound the almonds to a smooth paste with a spoonful of water; warm the butter, mix the almonds with this, and add the other ingredients, leaving out the whites of SMALL ALMOND PUDDINGS. 2 eggs, and be particular that these are well beaten. Mix well, butter some cups, half fill them, and bake the puddings from 20 minutes to 1/2 hour. Turn them out on a dish, and serve with sweet sauce, or with sifted sugar only.
TIME.-20 minutes to hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
This is a Victorian baked almond custard, and the problem with it is in the second ingredient rather than in the method.
- The bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernels are crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding them to a paste with a spoonful of water does. Unlike ratafia essence or almond extract, the raw kernels have not been processed to drive the cyanide off. Six kernels shared between six people is a small quantity, but bitter almonds are toxic and their sale for eating is restricted or prohibited in the United States and a number of other countries for this reason.
- Baking does not fix itTwenty minutes to half an hour in a cup mould is not a reliable detoxification step. Some hydrogen cyanide is volatile and will leave, but the amount remaining depends on the size of the kernels, the fineness of the paste and the depth of the pudding, none of which the recipe controls. Use a current almond pudding recipe instead.
- Portion size makes it worsePortion size — The puddings are baked in individual cups and the recipe is given as sufficient for six, so the six bitter almonds work out at roughly one per portion; a child eating one pudding gets the same share as an adult.
- The sweet almond quantity is lostThe text reads simply "lb. of sweet almonds" where the original printing carried a fraction that has dropped out. Comparable Beeton almond puddings use a quarter of a pound, but the figure here is genuinely unrecoverable from this page.
- What the period words mean"Sifted sugar" is fine sugar passed through a sieve, closer to caster or powdered sugar than to modern icing sugar with its added starch. The "cups" are unspecified small moulds — teacups or darioles would suit — buttered and half filled so the mixture can rise. "Sweet sauce" in Beeton covers a range of custard or sugar-and-butter sauces, sometimes brandy-flavoured.
- Average cost1s. 10d. is one shilling and tenpence, a real sum in the 1860s and a mark of how expensive almonds were — this is a company pudding, not a nursery one.
Baked almond puddings run through English cookery from the seventeenth century onward, when pounded almonds stood in for the ground almonds sold ready-milled today, and a marble mortar and a patient arm were the only route to a paste. The bitter almond was standard in these mixtures as a flavouring rather than a bulk ingredient: a handful among the sweet ones gave the intense marzipan note that is now supplied by almond extract or by ratafia essence, and the same logic produced ratafia biscuits and noyau liqueur. The toxicological literature of the period recorded that the kernels were dangerous in quantity, though how far that knowledge reached the kitchen is another matter, and the small proportions used in cakes and creams were treated as ordinary practice, with Beeton passing the usage on without comment. That regulators later restricted the sale of bitter almonds for eating is the clearest single measure of how far kitchen risk assessment has moved since.