Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Raspberry Brandy
Raspberry Brandy
Blanch about twenty bitter almonds, and cut them into small pieces. Pick carefully over two pounds of ripe raspberries to remove all the stems and leaves, and place them in a quart bottle with the almonds and one pound of crushed sugar. Fill the bottle up with brandy and cork it tightly, and keep it in a warm place for a month. Shake the bottle occasionally, If possible the bottle should be exposed to the sun. At the end of that time it may be removed to a dry store-cupboard. The brandy ought to be kept ten or twelve months before it is used.
This is a steeped fruit cordial of a very common nineteenth-century type, but its flavouring ingredient is the problem: twenty bitter almonds is not a trace amount, and the month-long infusion is designed to extract everything they contain.
- Bitter almonds are the hazardBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which converts to hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed, chopped or soaked in the presence of water and its own enzymes. That conversion is precisely what this recipe sets up: the almonds are cut small and left in liquid for a month in a warm place.
- The quantity is not incidentalTwenty bitter almonds in a quart is not a trace flavouring, even though the bottle is meant to be sipped over time. Commonly cited historic estimates put a fatal adult dose in the region of fifty or so raw bitter almonds, with much lower figures for children, and such estimates vary widely; with no way to know how much has been extracted, the margin is too uncertain for a home preparation.
- Time and warmth do not remove itCyanide is not destroyed by ageing. Keeping the bottle ten or twelve months, as the recipe directs, does nothing to make it safer, and the sugar and fruit mask any warning bitterness.
- Raw bitter almonds are not sold as foodIn the United States unprocessed bitter almonds cannot lawfully be sold for eating, and elsewhere they are variously restricted or subject to limits on hydrocyanic acid content. What is generally available is bitter almond extract or almond flavouring, from which the toxin has been removed during manufacture, and it is not a like-for-like swap in a maceration of this kind.
- If you want raspberry brandyUse a current, tested recipe for a fruit cordial. Do not attempt to adapt this one by reducing the almonds.
Fruit brandies and ratafias like this filled the still-room shelves of European households for centuries, and the bitter almond was their signature note: a few nuts, or a handful of peach or apricot kernels, gave the marzipan-and-cherry perfume that reads as "almond" to most palates, since sweet almonds themselves are comparatively mild. Cookbooks of the 1800s call for them casually, in ratafias, blancmanges, macaroons and puddings, and the danger, though discussed in nineteenth-century medical and household literature, was not always reflected in practice; the compound responsible, amygdalin, had been isolated by chemists earlier in the century, but regulation of bitter almonds as a food ingredient came much later. Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, gathered this alongside the other domestic preserves and cordials in his 1896 collection, where such recipes sit as much for the reference of a housekeeper as for the hotel kitchen. It is a good illustration of how a book can be entirely reliable about technique and entirely out of date about safety.