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Marzipan Paste
Blanch one pound of sweet almonds and a few bitter ones, place them in a mortar and pound until smooth, adding a few drops of rose-water to keep them from oiling. Put the almond paste into a lined saucepan with one pound of sugar, and stir over the fire with a wooden spoon until it will not stick to the fingers when touched by them. Dredge a paste-board well with powdered sugar, spread the paste out on it as thickly as possible, and cut it into cakes of any desired shape or size. Cover a baking-sheet with white paper, sprinkle it over with sugar, and lay the cakes on it. Place them in a slow oven, and bake until of a pale yellow color. Store and keep the cakes dry in tins.
The problem is in the first line. Bitter almonds are the reason this recipe cannot be followed as printed, and no adjustment to the sugar, the oven or the timing changes that.
- Bitter almonds are the hazardBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the nut's own enzymes convert to hydrogen cyanide when the kernels are crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding in a mortar with rose-water does. Raw bitter almonds are not sold as food in the United States for this reason, and the quantity in "a few bitter ones" is entirely undefined.
- Baking does not make it safeA slow oven and a pale-yellow finish will not reliably drive off the cyanide already generated in the paste, and the recipe never specifies a temperature or a holding time that would. The dose in a batch of small cakes is unpredictable, which is the core objection: there is no way to know what any one cake contains.
- Why the bitter almonds were thereThey were the flavouring, not the bulk — much of the almond intensity of nineteenth-century marzipan came from that fraction. Modern commercial almond extract supplies the same note from benzaldehyde, without the glycoside.
- What to do insteadUse a current marzipan or almond-paste recipe from a modern source. This one is worth reading as a record of Waldorf confectionery practice, not as working instructions.
Marzipan — from the German Marzipan, itself generally traced through Italian marzapane to an Arabic or Latin origin that has never been settled — reached the American hotel kitchen by way of German and Austrian pastry cooks. The technique here is the old confectioner's one: almonds pounded wet in a mortar, the rose-water added not for perfume but to stop the nuts releasing their oil and breaking the paste, then the sugar worked in over direct heat until the mass no longer tacks to a finger. That finger test stood in for a thermometer. The casual instruction to include "a few bitter ones" reflects a nineteenth-century confectioner's assumption that bitter almonds were simply a flavouring ingredient like any other, sold by grocers and druggists; the understanding that they release cyanide on crushing was known to chemists but had not yet reshaped what a cookbook felt able to print.