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Almond Cakes
Plunge three ounces shelled almonds in boiling water three minutes, drain, peel, then chop very fine. Roast to a nice golden colour in the oven. Prepare a griddle cake preparation, add the almonds, lightly mix, then proceed to finish the cakes in same manner.
COLD CLAM BROTH Open twelve large, fresh clams and place in a saucepan with all their liquor, add three pints cold water, four branches celery, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and boil five minutes. Strain through a double cheese-cloth into a stone jar, place jar in a basin with ice around and let get cold. Pour into six cups and send to table.
This is less a recipe than an instruction to enrich a batter you already know how to make, and the almonds are the whole of it.
- The batter is assumed, not given"a griddle cake preparation" means a plain pancake batter, which the compiler expected the cook to know. Any standard batter of a few cups' worth will take three ounces of chopped almonds; the book gives no quantities and no yield, so the batch size is guesswork.
- Blanch, then dryThree minutes in boiling water loosens the skins, which slip off between finger and thumb. Dry the nuts thoroughly on a towel before chopping, or they will steam rather than toast in the oven.
- Chop before roasting, and watch themThe recipe has you chop first, then colour the almonds. Finely chopped nuts colour fast, so spread them in one layer; the book gives no oven temperature, but a moderate oven (about 350F) with a check every three or four minutes will do, eight to twelve minutes being usually enough. They carry on darkening off the heat.
- Cool before addingThe recipe does not say so, but it is worth letting the roasted nuts come to room temperature before they go into the batter, then folding them in at the last moment so the flour is not overworked.
- "Lightly mix" is the hingeGriddle batter turns tough with stirring. Fold the almonds through in a few strokes and accept a streaky batter.
- Griddle heatMedium, around 375F on an electric griddle, lightly greased. Nut-studded cakes scorch more readily than plain ones because the almond fragments sit proud of the surface, so keep the pan a shade cooler than usual.
- ServingThe book gives no accompaniment. These take honey, warmed apricot preserve or plain butter and sugar better than a heavy maple syrup, which buries the almond.
Almonds ground or chopped into a batter belong to a long European tradition in which the nut stood in for richness — medieval and early modern kitchens used almond milk and almond paste heavily, partly for fast days when dairy was forbidden. Blanched almonds were an ordinary grocery item and a familiar shorthand for a dish elevated a step above the plain. The construction here, a base preparation named rather than written out with one variation appended, suggests a reader who already had a griddle cake batter by heart and needed only to be told what to do differently — though that is an inference from the form of the recipe rather than anything the page states.