No. 568

Almond Butter

Beurre d'Amandes

Pound in a mortar, one ounce of peeled sweet almonds mixed with a few bitter ones; add four ounces of sugar, and moisten with a little milk, then stir in eight ounces of fresh butter, and beat it all well together, then press the whole through a fine sieve.

← No. 567 Hazel-Nut Butter Hot & Cold Butters No. 569 Anchovy Butter →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a sweet compound butter from Ranhofer's dessert and garnish repertoire, but it is built on raw bitter almonds and cannot be reproduced as printed.

The bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding in a mortar with milk accomplishes. Nothing in this preparation heats the mixture, so nothing drives the cyanide off.
"A few" is not a doseThe quantity is left entirely to the cook, and the amygdalin content of raw bitter kernels varies from kernel to kernel, so guesswork is not acceptable. An unmeasured number pounded into a butter that will be spread by the spoonful gives no reliable way to know what any one serving contains.
You cannot buy the ingredient anywayRaw bitter almonds are not sold for food use in the United States and are restricted in many other countries. What survives of their flavour in modern kitchens is bitter almond extract or almond essence, sold in a form where the cyanogenic compounds have been removed.
Not a candidate for substitution hereThe bitter almonds supply the flavour accent the recipe is after, so this is not a recipe to patch. Use a current recipe for almond compound butter or almond paste if that is what you want.
Units, for reading the pageThe proportions are one ounce almonds, four ounces sugar, eight ounces butter — by weight, so half a pound of butter to a quarter pound of sugar. Ranhofer's "fresh butter" means unsalted.
What the sieve is forPressing the finished paste through a fine sieve was the nineteenth-century substitute for a food processor: it caught the almond fragments a mortar could not reduce and left a butter smooth enough to pipe or spread.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) was Charles Ranhofer's summation of thirty years as chef at Delmonico's, and its chapter of hot and cold butters reads like a parts catalogue — anchovy, ravigote, hazelnut, almond — small flavoured butters kept ready to finish a dish or fill a pastry. Bitter almonds were a standard flavouring in European confectionery well into the twentieth century, valued because the compound that makes them dangerous, amygdalin, is also the source of the intense marzipan aroma that sweet almonds lack; blanched and pounded in tiny proportion with sweet almonds, they gave macaroons, ratafias and frangipane their characteristic depth. Regulators caught up later: as the chemistry of cyanogenic glycosides became better understood, bitter almond kernels were pushed out of retail sale in favour of processed extracts, and recipes like this one now survive only as evidence of how a professional kitchen once thought about almond flavour.