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Potage, Cream of Almonds
Place in a large saucepan one pound clean, raw, lean veal bones, one pound fresh chicken bones, one sliced onion, two sliced leeks, four sliced branches celery, two branches parsley and one branch chervil. Moisten with three and a half quarts water, season with two teaspoons salt and simmer two hours, being careful to skim off scum once in a while. Plunge half pound sweet and four single bitter almonds in boiling water for three minutes, drain and peel, pound in mortar to a fine paste, transfer them to a saucepan with one pint milk and boil ten minutes. Mix in a saucepan one ounce butter with two and a half ounces flour, heat two minutes, then strain the broth through a strainer over this roux, add the almond milk, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and one saltspoon grated nutmeg, sharply mix with whisk until it comes to a boil and cook twenty minutes more. Dilute one egg yolk with a half gill cream and half ounce fresh butter, add to soup, continually mix while heating for three minutes, remove, strain cream through cheesecloth into a soup tureen and serve.
This is a classic French almond velouté built on a white bone broth, and everything about it is workable except one ingredient. That ingredient makes the recipe unusable as printed.
- The bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the almond's own enzyme converts to hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and wetted, as pounding to a paste and steeping in milk does. Four kernels in a soup of this size is a small quantity, and much of any cyanide released would be driven off during the boiling, but the dose in an unregulated kernel is unknowable and the ingredient is the one part of the recipe that should not simply be reproduced.
- Why blanching does not fix itThree minutes in boiling water loosens the skins but does not destroy the amygdalin itself, though it may partly deactivate the enzyme that releases cyanide from it.
- AvailabilityRaw bitter almonds cannot legally be sold for food in the United States and are restricted in many other countries, so the ingredient is not simply hard to find — it is controlled. Older cookbooks treat it as an ordinary grocery item because at the time it was one.
- The rest of the soupThe veal-and-chicken bone broth, the roux, the almond milk and the egg-yolk-and-cream liaison are all standard technique and pose no unusual risk. The problem is confined to one ingredient, which is precisely why the recipe reads so innocuously.
- If you want this soupUse a current recipe for cream of almond soup. Bitter almond flavour in modern cooking comes from almond extract or from apricot kernel preparations sold at controlled concentrations, and a present-day recipe will handle the proportions properly.
- Reading the measurementsFor anyone parsing the text rather than cooking from it: a gill is half a cup, a saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, and "branches" of celery, parsley and chervil are stalks or sprigs. Three and a half quarts of water over two pounds of bones is a light, clear broth rather than a concentrated stock.
Almond soups run deep in European cookery — medieval and Renaissance kitchens leaned hard on almond milk as a rich liquid permitted on fast days, when dairy was off the table, and the ground-almond thickened potage survived into the classical French repertoire long after the religious reason for it faded. By the time this recipe was written down, the dish had become a refined restaurant soup: a pale bone broth, a blond roux, almond milk, and a yolk-and-cream liaison finished at just below the boil. The four bitter almonds are the period's signature move. Sweet almonds on their own are, to many palates, rather mild, and cooks routinely added a few bitter kernels for the marzipan intensity that the compound benzaldehyde provides — the same instinct that put bitter almond into ratafias, macaroons and blancmange throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The toxicity was known; it was simply regarded as a matter of not overdoing it.