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Geneva Paste
Rub one pound of fresh butter into one pound of finely-sifted dried flour until the butter is entirely absorbed, then work in one pound of sugar and four ounces of blanched and pounded almonds, adding three bitter almonds to the quantity and a little salt. Mix with sufficient beaten egg to make a stiff paste. This is useful in making Genevese and other fancy pastry.
This is a sweet almond short paste, of the kind kept on hand in a hotel pastry section for lining moulds and cutting fancy shapes. It cannot be made as written, because of the three bitter almonds.
- The bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted crked into a paste. Pounding them with the sweet almonds and mixing with egg is exactly the condition that liberates it.
- Raw is the aggravating factorCommercial bitter almond flavouring is processed to remove the cyanide. Whole raw bitter almonds are not, and this paste is mixed raw and used to line moulds and cut shapes that may be tasted before baking. Sale of raw bitter almonds is prohibited in the United States and restricted in some other countries for this reason.
- No safe conversion is offered hereThree nuts in a batch of this size is a small proportion, and bitter almonds appear routinely in period pastry recipes, but the dose in an individual almond varies widely and we will not supply a number that implies a safe threshold. Use a current almond pastry recipe instead.
- What the quantities tell youEqual pounds of butter, flour and sugar with four ounces of almonds is a very rich, very sweet paste, closer to a sweet biscuit dough than to a lining pastry. Pound quantities like these make a large batch.
- "Dried flour"Flour was warmed and sifted to drive off moisture before being rubbed with butter. Modern bagged flour needs none of it.
Bitter almonds were a common source of almond flavour in nineteenth-century pastry work, and a few pounded in with the sweet ones gave the more pronounced marzipan note that sweet almonds alone do not. "Genevese" or Geneva pastry in Victorian and Edwardian kitchens generally meant small fancy almond cakes and lined tartlets, and this paste is a base preparation rather than a finished dish: Oscar Tschirky's book, drawn from the working practice of the Waldorf kitchens around the turn of the twentieth century, is full of such components, written for cooks who would know what to do with a batch of stiff almond paste once they had it. The danger of bitter almonds was recognised at the time, but the flavour was valued enough that the nuts stayed in domestic and professional recipes for decades before regulation and manufactured extracts displaced them.