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Almond Pudding
(Buda-Pesth.) This is a Jewish recipe. Much of the Jewish cookery is very dainty and well flavored.
Blanch 4 ounces sweet almonds and 3 of bitter almonds, dry them and pound very fine. Add 4 ounces of powdered sugar, 2 tablespoonfuls of rosewater, yolks of 4 eggs, and the beaten whites of 3. Whip for 10 minutes, pour into a buttered mould, and bake in a quick oven. Turn out and serve hot or cold, with cream or sauce.
The problem here is the three ounces of bitter almonds, which is not a flavouring quantity but a toxic dose. This pudding cannot be made as printed.
- Bitter almonds are the reasonBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding them into a wet paste does. Three ounces is roughly 60 to 80 kernels, well into the range associated with serious poisoning in an adult, and this is a single mould intended to be shared.
- Baking does not make it safeHeat drives off some hydrogen cyanide, but a buttered mould of dense almond batter is not a reliable way to remove it, and nothing in the method measures or controls what remains. The pudding is also offered cold, with no further heating at all.
- Why the book could call for themBitter almonds were an ordinary grocery item in nineteenth-century Europe, used as an almond-extract substitute in small amounts. Their sale to the public is now restricted or prohibited in a number of countries, including the United States, for precisely this reason.
- Almond extract is not a substitute hereModern almond extract supplies the same benzaldehyde note without the glycoside, but it cannot replace three ounces of nut solids by bulk. Rebalancing this pudding means rewriting it, so use a current almond pudding or almond sponge recipe instead.
- On the rest of the methodThe remaining technique — blanched nuts pounded fine, powdered sugar, separated eggs, a long whipping to aerate — is a standard flourless almond pudding of the period, and worth reading as such. A "quick oven" in period usage is generally taken as a hot one, somewhere around 400 to 450F.
The note "(Buda-Pesth.)" suggests this is one of the recipes gathered on the Continent, and the aside that "much of the Jewish cookery is very dainty and well flavored" reflects a common nineteenth-century Anglo-American appreciation of Central European Jewish baking, which often used ground nuts and beaten eggs rather than wheat flour. One practical root for that is Passover, when leavened grain is excluded; the technique of pounding blanched almonds with sugar and lifting the batter with whipped whites is also common in Hungarian and Austrian pastry generally. Rosewater as the perfume, rather than vanilla, points to an older tradition; it was a common sweet flavouring in medieval and early modern Europe and lingered in almond confections. The generous hand with bitter almonds is of its time, when they were sold freely by grocers.