Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Potato Pudding
Potato Pudding
Mrs. P.
One pound of potatoes, half pound sugar, half pound butter, eight eggs, a nutmeg, sweet and bitter almonds to taste, one glass spirits, a small cup of cream; potatoes and butter to be beaten to a cream, then the other ingredients added and let stand for two hours before it is ovened. This quantity makes a large pudding.
The problem here is one line in the ingredient list: bitter almonds. Everything else about this pudding is ordinary Victorian baking, but that single item puts the recipe outside what can responsibly be made today.
- Bitter almonds are the reason to stopBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and moistened — exactly what happens when they are pounded and beaten into a batter. The nineteenth-century cook used them as a flavouring in quantities judged entirely by taste, and "to taste" is not a dose.
- Baking does not make them safeSome of the volatile cyanide is driven off by heat, but the reaction begins the moment the almonds are ground and the mixture sits — here, for two hours before it goes near the oven. Neither the loss nor the residue is predictable in a home kitchen, and the recipe gives no quantity to work from.
- They are not a supermarket itemRaw bitter almonds cannot legally be sold for eating in the United States and are restricted in many other countries. If a jar turns up at a market or online, it is not a substitute for the sweet almonds in the same line.
- "One glass spirits" is unmeasurablePeriod usage often reckoned a wine glass at something like 2 fl oz, but the book names neither vessel nor spirit, so even that is a guess. Combined with the undefined almond quantity, there is no honest way to reconstruct the proportions.
- The rest of it is a very rich sweet puddingA pound of potato — presumably boiled and mashed, since it is to be "beaten to a cream" — with half a pound each of butter and sugar, eight eggs, cream and nutmeg; the potato is a starch binder, not a savoury element. If you want to bake something in this line, use a current recipe for an almond or potato pudding rather than adapting this one.
Sweet potato puddings of this kind — cooked potato beaten smooth with butter, sugar and a great many eggs, then baked — run through English and American cookery from the eighteenth century well into the nineteenth, sitting alongside carrot pudding and the older marrow puddings as ways of turning a cheap starch into something rich enough for company. Bitter almonds were the usual source of what we now buy as almond extract; a few pounded with the sweet ones gave the marzipan note that sweet almonds alone do not provide, and cookbooks of the period call for them casually, with no more precision than this one shows. Their toxicity was known — poisoning cases appear in the medical literature of the era — but regulation came much later, and the flavour is now supplied by benzaldehyde, either synthetic or derived from stone fruit kernels under controlled conditions. The attribution to "Mrs. P." is typical of a subscription cookbook assembled from contributions by named and initialled subscribers, a form well established in North America by this date.