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Cold Custard
Beat the yolks of four eggs with one pint of milk, put into a saucepan, and add one tablespoonful of pounded bitter almonds, half an ounce of isinglass, and sugar to taste. Stir the custard over the fire until the isinglass is dissolved, but do not let it boil; then strain it through a fine hair-sieve and pour it into a mould. When set and quite cold turn out the custard, and serve.
This is a set almond custard of the standard Victorian type, but it turns on an ingredient that is no longer sold as food in most of the world. The notes below explain the terms and why the dish cannot be made as printed.
- Bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are crushed and moistened — exactly what pounding them into milk does. A tablespoonful of pounded bitter almonds is a substantial dose, and the custard is never brought to the boil, so gentle heating cannot be relied on to drive off what has been released. Raw bitter almonds are banned from retail sale in the United States and restricted across the EU for this reason.
- Not the same as almond extractCommercial almond extract is flavoured with benzaldehyde, the aromatic compound that gives bitter almonds their scent, with the cyanogenic fraction removed. The two are not interchangeable in the direction this recipe implies, and no quantity of extract makes this version of the dish safe to reconstruct. Use a current custard recipe if you want the flavour.
- IsinglassA collagen gelatine made from the swim bladders of sturgeon and other fish, sold in sheets or shreds and used as a setting agent before packet gelatine became universal. Half an ounce to a pint of milk gives a firm set, and is in line with period proportions. It survives today mainly as a fining agent in beer and wine rather than a kitchen staple.
- Pint and ounceOscar was cooking in New York, so the pint is the US 16 fl oz measure, not the 20 fl oz imperial pint used in contemporary British books. Half an ounce is about 14 g by weight.
- Hair-sieveA sieve bottomed with woven horsehair, fine enough to catch almond solids and any threads of set egg. A fine-mesh nylon or steel strainer is the modern equivalent.
- "Over the fire"Nineteenth-century custards were worked directly on the range top or over a water bath, with the cook judging doneness by how the mixture coated the spoon. The instruction not to let it boil is about preventing the yolks from curdling, not about food safety — an egg custard stirred to setting point sits well below boiling.
Cold moulded custards belong to the long line of English and French crèmes stiffened with a fish or animal gelatine and turned out of a shape at table, and they were still standard hotel dessert work when Oscar Tschirky published his book in 1896. Bitter almonds were the period's default almond flavouring: cookbooks from the eighteenth century onward call for them by the handful in ratafias, macaroons, blancmanges and custards, and the strength of the scent meant a spoonful went a long way. Their danger was understood in outline — poisoning cases appear in nineteenth-century medical literature — and amygdalin itself had been isolated and named by Robiquet and Boutron-Charlard in 1830, but the regulatory response came later, which is why a recipe like this could sit unremarked in a fashionable hotel's collection. Isinglass, imported in quantity from Russian sturgeon fisheries, was the clearest and least flavoured setting agent available to a professional kitchen before refined powdered gelatine displaced it.