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Lemon Pudding
(Budino di limone) One big lemon.
Sugar, six ounces.
Sweet almonds with 3 bitter ones, six ounces.
Six eggs.
Cook the lemon in water, for which two hours will be enough. Remove dry and rub through a be enough. Remove dry and rub through a sieve. Before rubbing, however, taste it, because if it has a bitter taste it must be kept in cold water until it has lost that unpleasant taste. Add the sugar, the almonds skinned and ground very fine and the six yolks of the eggs. Beat the whites of the eggs and add them to the mixture that will then be put in a mold and baked like all other puddings. 205
The problem here is the three bitter almonds, which are not a flavouring quirk but a source of cyanide. The rest of the method is sound period technique, but the recipe as printed should not be followed.
- Bitter almondsBitter almonds (mandorle amare) contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is ground and moistened. Three bitter almonds divided among the servings of a pudding is a small dose rather than a lethal one, but the margin is much narrower for a child, and this is why the ingredient needs care. Raw bitter almonds cannot legally be sold for food in the United States and are restricted in a number of other countries.
- Why baking does not fix itHydrolysis begins as soon as the ground nut meets moisture, before the mould reaches the oven. Hydrogen cyanide is volatile and heating drives some of it off, but a gentle pudding bake cannot be relied on to remove it. Commercial bitter-almond flavouring is processed specifically to strip it out; a home kitchen is not.
- What the three almonds were forThey are there for perfume, not poison — that intense marzipan note that sweet almonds alone do not give. Modern Italian bakers usually get it from a few drops of almond extract or from armelline, sold in small quantities.
- The weightsSix ounces is about 170 g, for both the sugar and the almonds, against six eggs and one whole lemon — a very rich, marzipan-heavy custard by present-day proportions.
- The boiled lemonTwo hours of cooking, and the instruction to hold the fruit in cold water until the bitterness leaves, are aimed at the pith. The whole fruit, skin included, then goes through the sieve.
- "Baked like all other puddings"The phrase is a cross-reference to the book's other pudding recipes rather than an oversight; the mould preparation and oven heat are not given here.
- If you want to make itUse a current recipe for lemon almond pudding that specifies a safe flavouring. Do not substitute quantities into the text above.
The Italian Cook Book (compiled by Maria Gentile, 1919) draws heavily on Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene, the 1891 book that did more than any other to fix a shared repertoire for the newly unified Italy, and this budino di limone carries Artusi's habit of counting out almonds by the piece. The pairing of many sweet almonds with two or three bitter ones runs through Italian and French confectionery of the period issles amaretti and the armelline, apricot kernels, still added in small numbers to Sienese and Lombard sweets. It is often said that nineteenth-century cooks knew bitter almonds were dangerous in quantity and used them sparingly for that reason, though the toxicology was imprecise. The whole boiled lemon, meanwhile, points to a Mediterranean thrift that used skin, pith and flesh together rather than zest alone.