Important: Safety Warning
This page instructs cracking prune stones and eating the kernels inside. These kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide. Stone-fruit kernels should not be eaten.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Glazed Pistachios
Glazed Pistachios
Procure a dome-shaped mould, and place it in a large basin or bowl and pack around it broken salted ice; divide in halves a handful of blanched pistachios and macerate them as follows: Pour one pint of well-whipped cream on a strainer to drain, place in a basin and mix in enough sugar flavored with vanilla to sweeten it; when the nuts are well-drained, take out a small quantity of the mixture at a time with a skimmer, place it in the mould, sprinkle over a few of the pistachios, and continue in the same way until the mould is filled, then cover it with the lid, hermetically seal it with flour and water paste and pack it completely in ice, letting it remain there for about an hour and a quarter. Then turn out onto a folded napkin on a dish, and serve.
Prunes, Russian Style Put a pound of prunes in a pan with a small amount of water, sugar them to the taste and stew them gently until tender, then take out the stones from the prunes, crack them and put the kernels in with the fruit. Decorate the sides of a cylinder-mould with blanched and split sweet almonds, using a small quantity of liquid jelly to make them adhere, and then carefully pour in layers of the prunes and jelly. Put the mould in ice and leave it until the contents are quite firm. Sweeten some cream to taste with powdered sugar, flavor it with a few drops of essence of almonds, and then whip it to a stiff froth. When the jelly is ready, dip the mould into hot water, wipe it and turn the contents out onto a glass dish, fill the hollow up with the cream, and serve.
Two separate moulded desserts run together on one page. The pistachio cream is straightforward frozen work; the prune mould contains one instruction that rules it out.
- The prune kernelsThe recipe directs you to crack the stones and stir the kernels into the fruit. Plum and prune kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when chewed or digested, and the kernels from a full pound of prunes is not a trace amount. This is the reason for the caution above; use a current recipe for a prune mould instead.
- Essence of almondsIn 1896 this could mean true bitter-almond oil, which carries the same cyanide problem unless it has been rectified; the pharmacopoeial product of the period was supposed to be freed of hydrogen cyanide. Modern almond extract is benzaldehyde in alcohol and is a different product entirely.
- "Macerate" the pistachiosThe recipe says to macerate the blanched nuts but never says in what; the later instruction that they be "well-drained" shows they were soaked in some liquid. Drain them thoroughly, as the instruction insists, or the liquid will freeze into grit.
- Draining the creamWhipping a pint of cream and letting it drain on a sieve removes loose liquid so the unchurned mixture freezes dense rather than icy. Do not skip it; there is no churning here to break up crystals.
- Ice and salt, or a freezerBroken ice packed with coarse salt takes the bath well below freezing, which is why an hour and a quarter is enough. A domestic freezer will set a mould of this size, but allow considerably longer and judge it by feel rather than by the recipe's clock.
- The flour-paste sealFlour-and-water paste around the lid joint kept salty meltwater out of the cream. A well-fitting mould wrapped in cling film and foil accomplishes the same thing.
- Turning outA folded napkin on the dish absorbs the meltwater and stops the mould sliding. For the frozen cream, a few seconds of a warm damp cloth on the outside is enough; a hot-water dip, as directed for the jelly, will melt the surface.
- YieldA pint of cream plus sugar fills a mould serving six to eight as a small iced dessert at the end of a long menu.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book records the dessert end of a Waldorf dinner, where iced creams and jellies arrived turned out of shaped tin moulds: domes, cylinders, melon shapes, the whole vocabulary of the French glace moulée that American hotel kitchens inherited from Carême's generation. Both dishes depend on a technology now invisible: commercial block ice, broken and salted, which by the 1890s was cheap enough in New York that a hotel could freeze a cream in an hour without a churn. Pistachios reached the American trade largely from Sicily and the Levant and were expensive enough to read as luxury in themselves, their green a deliberate note against white cream. What "Russian style" signalled in the period is unclear, and the term is sometimes loosely connected to the elaborate service à la russe, though that phrase properly describes sequential course service rather than any moulded, chilled presentation; the practice of returning the kernels to stewed stone fruit is often said to have been widespread in Central and Eastern European cooking, where the bitter almond note was prized; the hazard it carries was not well understood at the time.