Almond Puffs
INGREDIENTS.- Equal weights of flour, castor sugar, butter and sweet almonds, allowing 2 bitter almonds to an ounce of the other ingredients.
AVERAGE COST, 1d. each.
Blanch and pound the almonds in a mortar to a smooth paste; melt the butter, dredge in the flour, and add the sugar and pounded almonds. Beat the mixture well, and put it into cups or moulds, which should be well buttered, and bake in a moderate oven for about 20 minutes, or longer, should the puffs be large. Turn them out on a dish, the bottom of the puff uppermost, and serve.
TIME.-20 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
The problem here is not the method but one ingredient: the bitter almonds, which Mrs Beeton calls for in quantity.
- Bitter almonds are the hazardBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding to a paste in a mortar does. The flavour compound Victorian cooks were after, benzaldehyde, comes with the poison attached.
- The quantity is not trivialThe wording is ambiguous: "2 bitter almonds to an ounce of the other ingredients" could mean an ounce of each or an ounce of the combined mixture, so a batch built on 4 oz each of flour, sugar, butter and almonds calls for somewhere between 8 and 32 bitter almonds, and a larger household batch proportionally more. Baking drives off some hydrogen cyanide but does not reliably destroy it, and reported toxic doses for a small child are low.
- You cannot buy them legally in much of the worldSale of raw bitter almonds for eating is prohibited in the United States and restricted across the EU and UK. If a bag labelled bitter almonds does turn up, it is not a curiosity to experiment with.
- Almond essence is not the same problem, but it is not a fix eitherAlmond essence is not the same problem, but it is not a substitute -- Modern almond extract delivers benzaldehyde without the cyanogenic glycoside. Swapping it in changes the flavour rather than reproducing it.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for almond puffs or friands built on sweet almonds or ground almonds alone.
- For readers who only want to understand the original"Castor sugar" is superfine sugar; a "moderate oven" in this period is usually reckoned at somewhere around 350F; and "1d. each" is one old penny per puff, the pre-decimal cost Mrs Beeton attached to most of her recipes.
Bitter almonds ran through nineteenth-century English confectionery the way vanilla runs through ours — ratafias, macaroons, blancmanges and puddings all leaned on a few of them for the sharp marzipan note that sweet almonds alone cannot give. Mrs Beeton's fixed ratio of two bitter to every ounce of the rest is typical of the era's confidence: the danger was known (the connection between bitter almonds and prussic acid had been established by chemists early in the century) but treated as a matter of dosage rather than avoidance, much as laudanum was. The puffs themselves belong to a family of small equal-weight cakes — equal flour, sugar, butter and nuts — baked in buttered cups or tin moulds, which is why the recipe ends with the instruction to turn them out upside down.