Home › The World's Kitchen › Cake, Louisiana
Cake, Louisiana
Plunge six ounces sweet almonds and two bitter ones in boiling water for five minutes. Drain on a sieve, then peel and pound four ounces of them in the mortar to a paste; place in a bowl with four egg yolks, two gills of milk, three ounces granulated sugar, one teaspoon kirsch and half teaspoon vanilla essence; briskly mix with a spatule for one minute, add two ounces butter, mix again briskly for one minute, add two ounces flour and mix well. Add two ounces raisins, half ounce chopped citron and half teaspoon baking powder; gently mix for half minute.
Lightly butter a large pudding mould. Split the peeled almonds in two; decorate the bottom of the mould with them, then fill the mould with the preparation. Set in the oven to bake for forty minutes. Remove, let cool for five minutes, unmould on a dish, sprinkle a little powdered sugar over and serve.
This is a rich almond pudding-cake, but it is built on an ingredient that is no longer sold for eating and cannot be safely substituted by guesswork.
- The bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and moistened. Two nuts spread through a whole cake is a very small dose, but bitter almonds are no longer sold for eating and their amygdalin content varies from nut to nut, so there is no way to know what a given pair carries.
- Blanching does not remove itThe five-minute plunge in boiling water loosens the skins; it does not destroy amygdalin, which sits in the kernel itself. Baking for forty minutes drives off some hydrogen cyanide but is not a reliable detoxification step.
- They are not sold for a reasonRaw bitter almonds cannot legally be sold for food in the United States and are restricted in many other countries. Where the flavour is wanted today it comes from commercial bitter-almond extract, which is produced under controls this recipe has none of. Use a current almond-cake recipe instead.
- GillsFor reading the original: a gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of milk.
- "Set in the oven"No temperature is given, and none can be deduced from the text; books of this period assume the cook knows the range. Nothing in the recipe indicates whether the mould was covered.
- The mouldThe recipe specifies only "a large pudding mould," lightly buttered, with the base decorated with the split peeled almonds so that they appear on top when the pudding is turned out. No shape, material or capacity is given.
Bitter almonds were a standard confectioner's flavouring across nineteenth-century Europe and America, a few kernels pounded in with the sweet ones to give the marzipan note that plain almonds lack — the same principle behind the use of peach and apricot kernels, which carry the same compound. Recipes of this era treat them casually because the danger was understood as a matter of quantity rather than prohibition. The title here is worth noticing: this is a French-technique cake — mortar, spatule, kirsch, an unmoulded pudding — carrying a Louisiana name, which may say less about Creole home baking than about how New Orleans functioned in the period as America's recognised outpost of French cooking. The regulation of bitter almonds came later, and commercially manufactured extract, from which the toxin is removed, replaced them in ordinary kitchens.