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Marchpane
(Germany.) Chop 1/2 pound of sweet and 1/2 ounce of bitter almonds. Add 1/2 pound of sugar, and boil to a paste. Knead it well, roll thin, and cut into squares. When these are dry, dip them in fancy icing, and use for dessert.
The problem here is the half ounce of bitter almonds, which is not an obsolete measure or an obsolete name but a genuinely toxic ingredient. The rest of the method is sound confectionery practice, but the recipe as written should not be attempted.
- Bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is chopped, wetted and chewed. Half an ounce is roughly ten to fifteen kernels, and the paste is never cooked hot enough or long enough to drive the volatile cyanide off reliably. Raw bitter almonds cannot legally be sold for eating in the United States and are restricted elsewhere.
- Why the sweet almonds do not helpThe bitter kernels are there for flavour, not bulk, and they are distributed evenly through the whole batch. Dividing a pound of paste into squares does not dilute the risk in any meaningful way for someone who eats several pieces.
- Not a substitution problemBitter almond extract sold today is either synthetic benzaldehyde or a distillate from which the cyanide has been removed, so it is not a like-for-like stand-in for the whole kernel the recipe intends. If you want marzipan, use a current recipe written for sweet almonds and commercial extract.
- On the vocabulary, for reading purposes"Boil to a paste" means cooking the chopped almonds with the sugar until the mass pulls away from the pan; "fancy icing" here is most likely a thin royal or sugar glaze, possibly tinted, into which the dried squares are dipped. Half a pound of almonds to half a pound of sugar is a fairly lean, workable ratio by modern standards.
Marchpane is the older English name for marzipan, in use from the early sixteenth century onward and only gradually displaced by the German-derived spelling in the nineteenth. Elizabethan banquets ended with elaborate marchpanes — moulded, gilded and painted sugar-and-almond confections — and by the time this book was compiled the word had shrunk to mean plain almond paste sweets. The attribution to Germany probably reflects the reputation of Lübeck and Königsberg as marzipan towns, though that fame is documented mainly from the nineteenth century onward. A small proportion of bitter almonds was common in European confectionery well into the twentieth century: cooks used them much the way we now use extract.