Important: Safety Warning
This page calls for bitter almonds as an ingredient. Bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide, and their sale for eating is restricted in many countries today.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Ratafias
INGREDIENTS.- lb. of sweet almonds, tb. of bitter ones, lb. of sifted loaf sugar, the white of 4 eggs. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 2d.
Blanch, skin and dry the almonds, and pound them in a mortar with the white of an egg; stir in the sugar, and gradually add the remaining whites of eggs, taking care that they are very thoroughly whisked.
REGENCY SOUP.
Drop the mixture through a small biscuit syringe, on to cartridge-paper, and bake the cakes from 10 to 12 minutes in rather a quick oven. A very small quantity should be dropped on the paper to form one cake, as the mixture spreads; when baked, the ratafias should be about the size of a large button.
TIME.-10 to 12 minutes.
Ravigote. (A French Salad Sauce; Mons. UDE'S Recipe.) - INGREDIENTS for moderate-sized dish. - 1 teaspoonful of mushroom ketchup, 1 teaspoonful of cavice, 1 teaspoonful of chili vinegar, 1 teaspoonful of Reading sauce, a piece of butter the size of an egg, 3 tablespoonfuls of thick Béchamel, 1 tablespoonful of minced parsley, 3 tablespoonfuls of cream, salt and pepper to taste. AVERAGE COST, 9d.
Scald the parsley, mince the leaves very fine and add to it all the other ingredients; after mixing the whole together thoroughly, the sauce will be ready for use.
SEASONABLE at any time.
These little almond biscuits are the ancestor of the ratafia and amaretto-style macaroon, but the version printed here is built on an ingredient that is no longer sold for eating, and the quantities as printed cannot be reconstructed with confidence.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are crushed and moistened — exactly what pounding them in a mortar with egg white does. A short bake at biscuit temperature cannot be relied on to drive it off. Sale of raw bitter almonds for food use is restricted or prohibited in the UK, the US and much of Europe for this reason.
- What was used insteadCommercial ratafias and macaroons have long been flavoured with a controlled bitter-almond essence or with apricot kernel extract processed to remove the cyanogenic compounds. If you want ratafias, work from a current recipe using sweet almonds and a proprietary almond extract rather than adapting this one.
- The proportions are not recoverableThe weights of sweet almonds, bitter almonds and loaf sugar have all lost their figures, so there is no honest way to scale the mixture. Even setting the safety question aside, this text cannot be followed as a set of instructions.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar broken from a cone and crushed; "sifted" means passed through a sieve to the fineness we would now call caster or icing sugar. It is not a brown or unrefined sugar.
- Cartridge paper and the syringeCartridge paper was a stiff, smooth drawing paper used as a baking sheet liner before parchment; baking parchment or a silicone mat is its equivalent. The "small biscuit syringe" is a piping bag with a plain narrow nozzle.
- "Rather a quick oven"Beeton gives no oven temperatures; 'quick oven' is usually rendered in modern terms as somewhere around 400–425F, and 'rather a quick oven' suggests a little under that. The 10 to 12 minutes given is consistent with small egg-white-and-almond biscuits, which are dried through as much as baked.
Ratafia was originally a drink — a sweetened spirit infused with fruit kernels or almonds, popular across seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, and the name is generally traced to the cordial drunk to ratify an agreement. The flavour, sharp and almondy from the kernels, became so associated with the word that it transferred to the small hard almond macaroons served alongside it, and by Beeton's day "ratafias" meant the biscuits alone. They were a Victorian workhorse: eaten with wine, crumbled into trifles and charlottes, or used to line a mould. The bitter almonds that gave them their characteristic edge were bought openly by nineteenth-century cooks, who used them freely in blancmanges, custards and ices without any sense that the ingredient carried a risk — an assumption that food regulation of the following century steadily withdrew.