Home › Recipes › Almond Cream Blanc Mange
Almond Cream Blanc Mange
1 pound of sweet almonds. 2 ounces of bitter almonds or peach kernels. 1 pound of sugar. 1 quart of cold water. 2 ounces of gelatine. 1 small cupful of cream.
Boil the almonds 2 minutes, then take off the skins and pound them a few at a time in a mortar, adding a little sugar and a spoonful of water occasionally. Put the almond paste in a bowl with the rest of the sugar and water and let steep a while. Dissolve the gelatine in a little warm water, add it to the milk-of-almonds, the cup of cream likewise and strain through a napkin with pressure. Set the blanc mange in molds on ice.
This is a classic almond-milk jelly, but its flavouring is the problem: two ounces of bitter almonds or peach kernels is a genuinely dangerous quantity in a preparation that is never cooked.
- The bitter almonds are the hazardBitter almonds and peach, apricot and cherry kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the crushed kernel meets moisture and the nut's own enzymes. Pounding them in a mortar and steeping them in cold water is precisely the process that liberates it.
- The quantity is far out of rangeTwo ounces is roughly 50-60 g of kernel, an amount in the range reported as lethal for an adult and well beyond it for a child, spread across a dessert that might be eaten by several people in unequal portions. The two-minute blanch is for slipping skins, not for driving off cyanide, and the only heat anywhere afterwards is the little warm water used to dissolve the gelatine.
- Why the book could call for themNineteenth-century bitter almonds were sold freely as a flavouring, and cooks used them the way we now use almond extract. Sale of bitter almonds for food use is restricted in the United States and regulated in much of Europe today, and the flavour being imitated here is simply benzaldehyde.
- Peach kernels are not a milder substituteThe recipe offers them as an equivalent, and they are: peach and apricot pits carry amygdalin at levels comparable to or above bitter almond. Kernels marketed as "bitter apricot seeds" have caused documented cyanide poisonings.
- The rest of the method is sound but not worth salvaging hereA pound of sweet almonds pounded with sugar and water, strained through a napkin, is ordinary almond milk, and two ounces of gelatine to a quart is a firm, sliceable set typical of moulded work of the period. If you want this dessert, use a current recipe for almond blancmange flavoured with extract rather than adapting these proportions.
- "Set on ice"The original assumes ice, whether an icebox or a bed of crushed ice; the intent is a cold set of several hours, which a refrigerator does. This is the only instruction in the recipe that translates cleanly.
Blanc mange is literally "white food," and the name reaches back to medieval European cookery, where a dish of pounded almonds, rice or capon and sugar was served white and delicate as a mark of refinement at table. By the time American pastry manuals of the later nineteenth century were written, the meat had long since dropped away and blancmange meant a moulded almond-milk jelly, set with isinglass, calf's-foot gelatine or, increasingly, the commercial gelatine that this recipe assumes. The bitter almond is the older half of the formula: cooks had used a small proportion of bitter kernels to sharpen the flavour of sweet almonds for centuries, and peach and apricot pits were the cheap domestic stand-in, saved from preserving season. The danger was not entirely unknown at the time -- poisoning cases were reported through the period -- but the flavouring stayed in print until essence of bitter almond, and later synthetic benzaldehyde, made the kernels unnecessary.