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Manna Kroup Pudding
INGREDIENTS for pudding for 4 or 5 persons. -3 tablespoonfuls of manna kroup, 12 bitter almonds, 1 pint of milk, sugar to taste, 3 eggs. AVERAGE COST, 8d.
Blanch and pound the almonds in a mortar; mix them with the manna kroup; pour over these a pint of boiling milk and let them steep for about 1/4 hour. When nearly cold, add sugar and the well-beaten eggs; mix all well together; put the pudding into a buttered dish and bake for hour.
TIME. hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A Victorian milk-and-semolina baked pudding whose flavouring ingredient is the problem: twelve bitter almonds is a real toxic dose, not a period quirk.
- The bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding in a mortar and steeping in milk does. Twelve of them in a single pudding is a substantial quantity of amygdalin, and estimates of a harmful dose vary; children are considerably more sensitive than adults. Cooking cannot be relied on to drive all of it off.
- AvailabilityRaw bitter almonds are not sold for food use in the United States and are regulated in a number of European countries, so the recipe is in any case difficult to reproduce as printed. Use a current baked semolina pudding recipe if you want the dish.
- Manna kroupFrom the Russian manna krupa: wheat semolina, the same grain product sold today as semolina or farina.
- "Bake for hour"The transcription has dropped the fraction here and in the TIME line; the original will have specified a part of an hour. The custard sets by coagulation of the eggs, not by browning.
- YieldThree tablespoons of semolina to a pint of milk and three eggs gives a soft, custardy pudding rather than a stiff one.
Beeton's spelling preserves the Russian word for semolina almost intact. The pudding belongs to the large Victorian family of baked milk-and-grain dishes — rice, sago, tapioca, arrowroot, vermicelli. Bitter almonds were a common almond flavouring of the period: before commercial almond essence was widely available, cooks got that intense marzipan note by pounding a few bitter almonds among the sweet ones, and Victorian cookery books use them in custards, ratafias and blancmanges. The dangers were known — nineteenth-century medical journals reported deaths from oil of bitter almonds.