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Almond Cakes
(Pithiviers.) This French town is as celebrated for its almond cakes as Basle is for honey cakes. Travellers ask for them, but can rarely obtain a recipe for either. Blanch and pound 8 ounces sweet almonds and 1 ounce bitter almonds, add 6 tablespoonfuls of sugar, and 8 eggs well beaten, 6 tablespoonfuls of dry flour, and the zest or rind of a lemon. Add 1/2 pound of butter, and stir all lightly. Pour into small buttered tins and let it rise before baking, covered with paper, for 1/2 hour.
The problem here is not the technique but a single ingredient: the ounce of bitter almonds, which was ordinary in 1900 and is neither sold nor safe today.
- Bitter almonds and cyanideBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the almond's own enzyme converts to hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and moistened — exactly what pounding does. An ounce is roughly 25 to 30 kernels; published estimates of a toxic dose vary widely, but quantities in this range fall within the region where serious poisoning has been reported, and the margin for a child is much smaller.
- Baking does not make it safeHeat destroys some of the enzyme but does not reliably remove the cyanide already released during pounding, and this batter sits and rises before it ever reaches the oven. Half an hour under paper in small tins is not a detoxification step.
- The quantity is the issue, not the traceCommercial bitter almond flavouring is required to be free of prussic acid, and is used in drops rather than by the ounce. This recipe calls for whole raw kernels by weight, which is a different order of magnitude entirely.
- You will not find the ingredientRaw bitter almonds are not legally sold for eating in the United States, and a number of European countries restrict them, so the recipe is in practice very difficult to follow as printed.
- If you want a PithiviersUse a current recipe. Modern versions build the almond cream from sweet almonds alone with a measured almond extract for aroma, and are not adaptations of this text.
- On the rest of the methodFor reading purposes: six tablespoonfuls of sugar and of flour against eight eggs and half a pound of butter makes this a very rich, barely-flour-bound almond batter, and "let it rise" means resting it, not yeast — the lift comes from the beaten eggs.
Pithiviers, in the Loiret northeast of Orléans, has been known for almond baking for centuries, and the town's name now attaches to two things: the puff-pastry gâteau de Pithiviers filled with almond cream, and the Pithiviers fondant, a plainer almond cake of roughly the sort described here, which local tradition holds to be the older of the two. The author's complaint — that travellers can eat the cakes but rarely get the recipe — is a running theme in late-Victorian travel cookery. The pairing with Basle's Leckerli honey cakes is telling: both are town specialities. The free use of bitter almonds alongside sweet is the clearest date-stamp on the page; before they were regulated, they were the standard way to get a strong marzipan aroma, and nineteenth-century cookbooks call for them by the ounce without comment.