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Noyau Cream
Blanch about one-fourth pound of Jordan, and one ounce of bitter almonds, throw them into cold water; rinse them well and pound in a mortar with two ounces of sugar and one gill of cream. Mix well together and rub through a hair-sieve into a basin, add one pint of whipped cream flavored with noyau, and one ounce of dissolved isinglass, sweeten to taste, mix well together and pour into a mould. When set it is ready for use.
The failure here is a single ingredient, and it is not a matter of technique or timing: the recipe calls for an ounce of raw bitter almonds in an uncooked cream that is never heated.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding in a mortar with cream accomplishes. An ounce is on the order of twenty kernels, within the range that has caused poisoning even allowing for the mould being shared, and children are affected by far less.
- Nothing in the method removes itBlanching and rinsing strip the skins, not the glycoside, which sits in the kernel itself. The cream is set with isinglass and chilled; no step applies the prolonged heat that drives off the volatile cyanide. A modern almond-flavored cream recipe should be used instead.
- Not sold as food todayRaw bitter almonds cannot legally be sold for eating in the United States and are restricted in the UK and EU. The "Jordan almonds" of the other three-quarters of a pound are simply large sweet almonds, once imported through Málaga — the name is a corruption of jardin, not a reference to the river.
- NoyauNoyau (from French noyau, "kernel") is a brandy or spirit liqueur flavored with stone-fruit pits, so the recipe is doubling down on the same bitter-kernel note it gets from the almonds. Commercial noyau and crème de noyaux today are flavored to be safe at drinking quantities.
- IsinglassIsinglass is a gelatin obtained from the swim bladders of sturgeon and other fish, sold in leaf or shred form and dissolved in hot water. It has largely disappeared from the kitchen, surviving mainly as a fining agent in brewing.
- Units and vesselsA gill is half a cup. A hair-sieve is a fine sieve of woven horsehair, the period equivalent of a fine-mesh strainer or a chinois lined with muslin.
Noyau cream belongs to a family of nineteenth-century molded creams and bavarois that leaned on the almond-and-stone-fruit flavor known in French cookery as noyau — the taste of benzaldehyde, which is what we now recognize as "almond extract" or marzipan. Before synthetic benzaldehyde became cheap in the later nineteenth century, that flavor came from the kernels themselves: bitter almonds, peach and apricot pits, or the liqueurs distilled from them, and English and American cookbooks of the period call for them freely. Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection gathered the standard repertoire of a large hotel kitchen, and this is a plain example of the sort of dessert it records. That the danger of the ingredient went unremarked reflects how routine it was; poisonings from bitter almonds and almond-flavored waters were documented through the century, and regulation of their sale as food followed only later.