Imagine being fortunate enough to eat from the Sultan’s kitchen during the Ottoman Empire, with its 500 square meters of industry driven by 16 specialty chefs and 200 assistants. Hopefully you would have had better manners than I as processions of soups, stews, pilavs, dolma, salads, meze, pickles and dishes incorporating doughs kneaded until they were “soft as an earlobe” were laid in front of us.
And in course after course, there would be almonds.
Almonds are Very Important. We know this because their CV is wildly disproportionate to something you leave in a bowl next to the drinks. The Greek amygdala, for instance, means almond and anatomists thought the small, curved shape in the brain looked like an almond. So, when somebody tells you almonds are brain food, there is at least an etymological case.
Almonds’ enduring popularity
They are the world’s most popular tree nut, were buried with pharaoh, were responsible for Cleopatra’s complexion; launched a European-wide paternity suit over marzipan; and were thrown by Romans at newlyweds as a rite of fertility.
A surviving Italian and Greek tradition gives the happy couple five Jordan almonds with corresponding wishes for health, wealth, happiness, fertility and longevity. (By now they probably include a sixth nut-wish for an affordable car.) South Africans, meanwhile, frequently persist in offering wedding guests pink and white sugar-coated almonds in tacky little plastic baskets. Sigh.
Almonds are a fruit masquerading as a nut, according to the author of the indispensable Spanish cookbook, Brindisa. Early season fresh almonds are soft and fuzzy and shaped like a tiny peach. Inside, the kernel is tender and translucent, with the tart, grassy flavour of green apple or sugar snap pea. In various parts of the world, these young almonds are stir-fried, pickled, or preserved.
Humanity has essentially spent several thousand years breeding one branch of the family for the flesh around the stone and another for the thing inside the stone. Their kinship becomes clear when you have been schooled by a (proper) Trad Farm Wife to include two or three apricot kernels in each jar of your jam – partly to boost its swagger, but mainly so you will not be Discussed by the Traditionalists.
Say what about bitter almonds?
The flavour we associate with bitter almonds comes largely from benzaldehyde. Bitter almonds themselves require processing because of their cyanide content (a small drawback, admittedly) but that glorious almond flavour gives us almond extract, almond essence and the Italian liqueur, Amaretto.
When a friend pierced one of my ears by sterilising the needle in my drink, the libation in question was a Godmother, which is equal parts vodka and Amaretto. My fond memories of this occasion are a little hazy. And before you ask, a Godfather is equal parts Amaretto and Scotch whisky.
Our last bit of trivial food lore rests on, according to Barack Obama, the fake news swirling around the First Family when Americans still had presidents interested in disseminating truth. Rumour had it that Michelle allowed him only seven almonds for an evening snack, but he pooh-poohed the allegation and, like so many of us, wondered who could stop there? Good thing: you need 23 almonds, or some 28g, to tick off roughly 6g of protein, 4g of fibre and 35% of your daily vitamin E requirement, which is a powerful antioxidant. (I had to look that up. Who knows from vitamin E?)
Pliny the Elder was even more specific than Michelle or modern nutritional science. He advocated eating five bitter almonds before “a carouse” in order to avoid drunkenness. Of course, he also promoted such preventatives as eating roast sheep lung, raw owl eggs soaked in wine, or ground-up swallow-beak dust…
The almonds in Spain are… very Moorish
Spain’s Marcona almond is one of the greats: rounder, softer and fattier than your run-of-the-mill almond, and luscious when fried and salted alongside a glass of jerez. The varietal’s high fat content also makes these almonds essential in Spanish nougat to help bind the ingredients.
Thanks to the Spaniards, we crush almonds with garlic and parsley for a picada and spoon it over a stew of onions cooked slowly until browned, with grated peak-season summer tomatoes and chickpeas stirred in towards the end. Your arb Tuesday (and nearly any soup) suddenly got so much sexier.
Use Marcona – or any almonds, really – to make a legacy of the Moors, ajo blanco, which is, well, moreish. Sorry.
I’ve amended the recipe from the London restaurant Moro. Mine is lighter and fresher and probably sacrilegious: For four people, throw into a blender 100g of ground almonds (you can use a coarse almond flour), a chopped cucumber, 2 garlic cloves crushed with a teaspoon of sea salt, 3 tablespoons of olive oil, 3 tablespoons of sherry vinegar, and 400g of green grapes. Blend until smooth and silky and garnish with another 100g or so of cold, halved green grapes. Dot with a good green olive oil when serving.
Almonds in Morocco, Mexico and beyond
Moroccan food is equally almond-obsessed, using them in tagines, pastries and desserts.
I once made a fairly elaborate Moroccan meal for my book club, which included the fiddly b’stilla – a triumphant mélange of phyllo pastry, chicken, sugar, almonds and cinnamon. Halfway through making it, I found myself checking the price of a flight to Fez because I thought it might be quicker to go and fetch one. But I persevered. And because we were sampling some sherry, I’d patiently pitted some dates and stuffed them with almonds for a nibble. Then I watched most of my fellow readers carefully pick them out thinking they were pits. Hospitality can be testing.
Back to that Ottoman kitchen, where you might find chicken and almond soup enriched with a bit of rice, butter, egg yolks and lemon, perfumed with saffron and bejewelled with pomegranate seeds; chicken with honey, apricots, grapes, almonds and barley vermicelli; or mutton on the bone cooked with honey, vinegar, black grapes, black plums, dried apricots, almonds, onions. Today’s Turks can even manage to make the almond butter we stir into our oats and blend into our smoothies exotic by adding some rosewater to the blender when they make it.
In Oaxaca, Mexico, you might be served a pot roast of beef studded with bacon and almonds and cooked with dusky, brick-coloured ancho chiles. The Chinese stir-fry them, often with chicken. In India they are used to thicken curries and you may be lucky enough to have a hostess hand you some almond halwa dyed cadmium yellow with saffron. The Puerto Ricans enhance their picadillo (spiced mince with raisins and sliced green olives) with toasted almonds.
More prosaically, when asparagus season arrives, I immediately reach for the slivered almonds, cook a handful in a knob of butter and toss them with the steamed spears, some lemon juice, and flaky salt. The same technique will also get you a perfectly respectable trout amandine.
Come to think of it, every couple of weeks I toast a jarful of slivered almonds along with five or six kinds of toasted seeds to “frow” (as Jamie Oliver might instruct us) over rice dishes, steamed vegetables, salads and anything else looking a little underdressed and embarrassed.
In which almonds offset sweetness
And then there are the desserts.
Puddings, tarts, cakes, biscuits, frangipane, marzipan, macaroons. One food writer with strong views once asserted that a banana split without toasted slivered almonds was like a Bee Gee in a striped button-down shirt. That analogy pertains to most desserts, really.
To tame lemon’s sharpness (if you insist), ground almonds are your friend – use them in the base for a tart, a cake batter or a filling. You can even go full Tudor and send baskets full of little puff-pastry shells with a filling reminiscent of cheesecake with lemon and almonds to grieving ladies in waiting (or friends down the street) as Hilary Mantel’s Henry VIII did, after beheading Anne Boleyn. Nothing says “sorry for the execution” like lemons and almonds.
Moro also presents a gloriouso almond tart with oloroso. Since South Africa has stopped producing dry sherry, so you’ll have to find an importer for the decent stuff, but mercifully, quince paste (membrillo) is becoming much easier to procure, sparing you the medieval labour of standing over a pot stirring molten quince and sugar until one of you capitulates.
Julia Child made a TV series many years ago with various master chefs and one recipe lodged in my head is for almond roasted figs: toast about a cup of blanched almonds in a 180-degree oven. Let them cool and then blitz them until they are the size of coarse breadcrumbs. Add 1/3 cup light brown sugar. Beat 3 egg whites until frothy, then add in 2 tsp sugar. Dip each of 12 figs into the egg whites to coat evenly and roll in the almond crumbs. Stand them up in a buttered baking dish and roast at 200 degrees for about 12 minutes until heated through and softened, but still holding their shape. Serve with an appropriate ice cream. This is the sort of pudding that makes people assume you know what you are doing.
Do not correct them.
Because some desserts simply have names too good not to make, there is Persian Love Cake, with components including almonds, citrus, cardamom and strewn rose petals. This is perfume and romance in cake form. Take the trouble to crack open green cardamom pods and gently pound the seeds rather than reaching for the dusty ground stuff. Love, apparently, requires effort.
And finally, from the deep recesses of my childhood recollections, I was once served Moonlit Blueberry pie with Almond Crème Chantilly after school by my best friend’s mother. I can only guess what was in it. If it even existed. But with a name like that, who needs details?
