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Almond Bisque
Take 1 pound of sugar. 12 ounces of sweet almonds. 2 ounces of bitter almonds. Blanch the almonds, split them and put them in a slack oven to dry and acquire a light yellow color. Put the sugar in a kettle on the fire without any water and stir it till it is all melted and of the color of golden syrup or light molasses. Then put in the hot almonds, stir gently to mix, and pour the candy on to a large platter.
When cold pound the candy quite fine, put it into 3 pints of rich milk, set it on the fire and when it boils add the beaten yolks of 10 eggs. Strain the burnt almond custard thus made into a freezer and freeze as usual and beat light.
This is a burnt-almond (praline) ice cream, and the failure point is the two ounces of bitter almonds. That is not a quirk of old phrasing; it is a genuinely dangerous quantity of a genuinely toxic ingredient, and the recipe cannot be scaled or adjusted into safety here.
- Bitter almonds are a cyanide sourceBitter almonds (the kernels of Prunus dulcis var. amara, and the closely related apricot and peach kernels sold under similar names) contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed or chewed in the presence of moisture. Sweet almonds contain only traces; bitter almonds contain enough that a small handful is considered a serious poisoning risk in an adult and a much smaller amount in a child.
- The quantity here is far out of rangeTwo ounces is roughly 40 to 50 kernels, pounded fine and divided among a batch of ice cream that a household would eat in a sitting or two. Bitter almonds were generally used as a flavouring accent rather than as a bulk ingredient, and even that practice has largely been abandoned. This proportion is not a trace flavouring.
- The cooking here does not remove itCyanide is liberated when the crushed kernel meets moisture; the traditional handling was prolonged boiling with the water discarded, which drives it off, while sustained heat also destroys the enzyme that releases it. Nothing in this method amounts to that: the blanching called for is the brief scald used to slip the skins, after which the almonds are dried in the oven, coated in caramel, pounded, and then infused into milk that boils only briefly before being strained and frozen -- the toxin goes into the custard and stays there.
- They are also not legally soldRaw bitter almonds cannot be sold to consumers in the United States and are restricted in many other countries. A bag labelled "bitter almonds" is often apricot kernel, which carries the same amygdalin problem.
- A second, smaller problem: the custardThe yolks of ten eggs are stirred into boiling milk and then strained straight into the freezer, with no held cooking time. Modern practice cooks a custard base to a measured temperature specifically to make the eggs safe, and this recipe never does.
- If you want the flavourBurnt-almond ice cream made entirely with sweet almonds is a standing item in current ice cream books, and a modern recipe with a cooked custard base should be used. Do not attempt to reconstruct this one with a reduced quantity of bitter almonds.
Burnt almond — pralin in French usage — meant sugar cooked to a deep caramel with almonds stirred in, cooled hard, then pounded to a coarse powder for flavouring creams, ices and fillings. The word "bisque" in nineteenth-century American confectionery had nothing to do with soup; it described an ice cream carrying crushed nuts or macaroon crumbs, and burnt-almond bisque was one such flavour, appearing alongside vanilla, lemon and coffee. Bitter almonds appear in pastry books of this period as a source of the almond aroma we now get from benzaldehyde-based almond extract; the same kernels went into ratafias, macaroons and noyau cordials. The danger was known — poisonings from almond flavouring were reported at the time — but the quantities in print stayed high until food regulation caught up with them in the early twentieth century, which is why this recipe reads as ordinary and is not.