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Brandy Cream
Blanch and pound a couple of dozen of sweet and bitter almonds, place in a saucepan with a little milk and boil; let the mixture become cool, then add the yolks of five eggs beaten up with a little cream, a little sifted sugar, and pour in a couple of wineglassfuls of brandy. Mix well in a quart of cream, stirring well by the side of the fire until it is well thickened, then pour into small glasses or cups and serve.
The hinge of this recipe is also the reason it cannot be made: bitter almonds. Everything else is a straightforward stirred custard, but the almonds put the dish outside what a modern kitchen should attempt.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernels are crushed and wetted — for blanching and pounding does exactly that. The quantity here is unstated and unmeasurable: "a couple of dozen of sweet and bitter almonds" gives no ratio between the two, so there is no way to know how much bitter almond the cook was expected to use.
- Boiling does not make them safeHeating milk with pounded bitter almonds drives off some hydrogen cyanide but does not reliably remove it, and the recipe never states a temperature or a holding time. Commercial bitter almond oil is steam-distilled and the toxin removed under controlled conditions; a saucepan of milk is not that process. Sale of raw bitter almonds is restricted in the United States for this reason.
- The custard is barely cookedFive yolks stirred into a quart of cream "by the side of the fire" is a deliberately gentle method, meant to thicken without curdling. It leaves the eggs well short of any pasteurising temperature, and the brandy does not compensate. On its own this would be an ordinary period risk; combined with the almonds it is another reason to leave the recipe on the page.
- What the units meanA wineglassful in this era is roughly 2 fl oz, so "a couple of wineglassfuls" is about half a cup of brandy. A quart of cream is 32 fl oz. Recorded here for reading the recipe, not for making it.
- If you want the dishBrandy-flavoured pouring custards and set creams are well covered by current recipes that specify egg temperatures and use commercially prepared almond flavouring. Use one of those.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection catalogues the Waldorf's working repertoire, and this is a hotel version of a very old European sweet: a rich stirred custard perfumed with almond and fortified with spirit, closer to an eighteenth-century posset or syllabub than to anything called cream today. The pairing of sweet and bitter almonds was long-standing confectioners' practice, the bitter kernels supplying the intense marzipan note that sweet almonds alone cannot give — the same flavour now sold as almond extract, whose characteristic compound is benzaldehyde, made synthetically or obtained from bitter almond oil with the prussic acid removed. Nineteenth-century cookbooks commonly used bitter almonds without warning, though some chemists and a few domestic writers did note the hazard; restrictions on their sale came later. Served in small glasses at the end of a meal, this belongs to the same family as the boozy egg-and-cream drinks — eggnog, syllabub, advocaat — that blurred the line between dessert and nightcap.