Home › The World's Kitchen › Pudding, Geraldina
Pudding, Geraldina
Pound in a mortar to a pulp three ounces sweet, peeled almonds and two beans peeled bitter almonds. Place the paste in a saucepan with one pint cold milk and boil for ten minutes. Have in another saucepan four tablespoons rice flour and drop in, little by little, the boiling milk right on top of the flour, sharply mixing continually while adding it. Now add one ounce good butter and continue to mix with a wooden spoon for five minutes, keeping it on the range. Remove the pan on a table, add two ounces powdered sugar, one teaspoon vanilla essence, two egg yolks and a tablespoon cold cream; briskly mix the whole well to-together with a skimmer for two minutes. Beat up the whites of the two eggs to a stiff froth, add to the preparation and gently mix with the skimmer for one minute.
Lightly butter a quart pudding mould, pour the preparation into the mould, place it in a saucepan, pour in boiling water up to half the height of the mould, and place it in the oven to steam for forty minutes. Remove, unmould on a hot dish. Pour a hot apricot sauce over the pudding and serve.
The pudding itself is a simple steamed rice-flour cream, but the flavouring is the problem: it is built on bitter almonds, which are not a culinary ingredient in the modern sense.
- Bitter almonds are the reason to stopBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and wetted — which is what pounding to a pulp and mixing with milk does. Figures commonly cited put a dangerous dose for a small child at only a handful of kernels, though such figures vary; this recipe calls for just two, so the quantity here is small. Potency cannot be gauged accurately by eye, and bitterness is only a crude indication of strength.
- Boiling does not make them safeBoiling drives off some of the volatile hydrogen cyanide but cannot be relied on to remove it, and the pudding is then steamed in a mould set in water, which does not vent freely. Bitter almonds were conventionally called for in very small numbers, and their potency was recognised.
- The ingredient is no longer sold as foodRaw bitter almonds cannot legally be sold for eating in the United States, and their sale is restricted in a number of European countries. What is on shelves under similar names — bitter almond flavouring, almond extract — is a processed product, either synthetic benzaldehyde or bitter almond oil with the prussic acid removed, and a recipe calling for whole peeled bitter almond "beans" cannot be read as calling for it.
- Wild variabilityKernel potency varies between varieties and growing conditions. The original's "two beans" gives no weight, so even a cook who obtained them would be estimating the dose.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for a steamed almond cream or blancmange pudding from a modern source, where the flavouring is a measured commercial extract.
- For reading the originalA "skimmer" here is a flat perforated spoon. "Rice flour" is finely milled rice, not rice starch or cream of rice.
Bitter almonds run through European confectionery from the medieval period onward: they are the traditional source of the sharp marzipan-and-cherry note that industrial benzaldehyde now supplies, and old French and Italian pastry manuals routinely specify a few of them alongside a larger quantity of sweet almonds. The imbalance tells you the bitter kernel was understood as a seasoning rather than a nut. Puddings of this type, thickened with rice flour, lightened with whipped whites and steamed in a buttered mould in a water bath, belong to the professional restaurant repertoire that The International Cook Book drew on; the personal name attached to the dish follows the nineteenth-century kitchen habit of dedicating a composition to a patron or performer, a convention more often decorative than documented.