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Almond Custard
1080. Take three bitter almonds with a little cinnamon, and rub some fresh lemon-peel grated on two ounces of lump-sugar, put them in a pint of milk or cream, and simmer them for a quarter of an hour, then strain and stir till cool. After this mix with the milk the yolks of four eggs well beaten, simmer again until it becomes a thick custard, then add an ounce of sweet almonds beaten smooth with rose water.
This is a nineteenth-century almond custard whose flavour depends on bitter almonds, an ingredient that is not sold for food in Britain or the United States today and should not be substituted for or sought out.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the almond's own enzymes convert to hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and wetted. This recipe does not say to crush the kernels, but it does steep and simmer them in milk. The quantity in a single nut varies enormously with variety and origin, so "three bitter almonds" is not a measured dose of anything.
- Heating does not make them safeHeating cannot be relied on to make them safe -- a quarter-hour simmer will drive off some of the hydrogen cyanide, but it does not reliably destroy amygdalin. Recipes of this period treated bitter almonds as a flavouring like cinnamon; that assumption is no longer accepted.
- Why they are not on saleRaw bitter almonds are not sold to consumers as food in the UK or the US, where their sale is restricted. Where the kernels are processed commercially it is for bitter almond oil, which for food use is produced free of prussic acid. Kernels bought informally or online carry no such processing.
- Apricot and peach kernels are not a workaroundThese share the same chemistry as bitter almonds and are subject to the same warnings. Substituting them reproduces the hazard rather than avoiding it.
- If you want this flavourThe almond note here is the point of the dish, and a current recipe using a food-grade almond extract or bitter almond flavouring should be used instead. We are not offering a conversion of this one.
- Reading the rest of the methodThe sweet almonds beaten with rose water at the end are ordinary eating almonds and pose no such issue, and rubbing sugar lumps over lemon peel to draw out the oil is still a sound technique. Neither redeems the steeping step.