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Almond Biscuits
Blanch and pound an equal quantity of bitter and sweet almonds, adding a few drops of orange-water to prevent them from oiling. Beat the yolks of some eggs in a little powdered sugar, add the almond pulp and sufficient flour to form a stiff paste, and roll out to one-quarter of an inch in thickness. Cut into shapes with a pastry-cutter or the rim of a wineglass, and bake on a greased baking-sheet until a light brown.
This is a period almond cookie, but the almond mixture at its centre puts it out of reach of a modern kitchen. The problem is the proportion of bitter almonds, not the technique.
- Bitter almonds are the hinge, and they are toxicBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding to a pulp does. The quantities commonly cited as dangerous are small: a handful of raw kernels is repeatedly given as a risk to a child, and several dozen as a risk to an adult, though reported figures vary.
- "An equal quantity" is far past any safe traceWhere bitter almond appears in modern baking at all, it is as a few drops of heavily diluted flavouring extract. A paste that is half bitter almond by volume is orders of magnitude beyond that, and the short bake in these thin biscuits does not reliably drive off the cyanide.
- You cannot legally buy the key ingredient anywaySale of raw bitter almonds for eating is prohibited or tightly restricted in the United States and much of Europe. What is sold as "bitter almond" today is normally an extract or a processed oil with the cyanide removed.
- The recipe gives no quantities at all"Some eggs," "a little powdered sugar," "sufficient flour" — the instructions assume a cook working by feel. There is no way to reconstruct the ratios from the text, which is a second reason to work from a current almond biscuit recipe instead.
- Orange-waterOrange-flower water, distilled from bitter orange blossom, still sold in Middle Eastern and North African groceries. Its job here is partly flavour and partly moisture, to stop the pounded nuts from turning greasy under the pestle.
Bitter almonds were a standard confectioner's ingredient across nineteenth-century Europe and America, valued for the intense marzipan note that sweet almonds alone cannot give — the same note now supplied by synthetic benzaldehyde in "almond extract." Cooks of the period knew the kernels were dangerous in quantity; cookbooks and pharmacopoeias of the era discuss the toxicity of prussic acid openly. That Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) records the formula without comment says something about how ordinary the ingredient was in a hotel kitchen of the 1890s. Regulation caught up in the twentieth century, and the raw bitter kernel disappeared from the domestic pantry in favour of the bottled extract.