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  • From: Bill Jones <billj AT harborside.com>
  • To: Homestead mailing list digest <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] Re: Almonds
  • Date: Mon, 06 Dec 2004 15:00:27 -0800

I knew that all the flavor in almond extract cannot come from hydrogen cyanide, because it boils at a very low temperature and would be lost in a cookie.

Maude Grieve's herbal is now online at www.botanical.com. She says under Constituents that the essental oil of bitter almonds is called benzaldehyde (the name I couldn't remember). They also contain cyanide in fairly great amounts, like all seeds in that family. But it's the former that's remaining in your cookie. I looked in the table of compounds in the CRC Manual and it gives boiling point (at sea level) as 178 C for benzaldehyde and 26 C (about room temperature) for cyanide.

Why is the plant producing two compounds that smell alike, one poisonous and other not? The answer can only be that benzaldehyde is a *poison mimic*. The genus Amygdalus has evolved in response to predation by small mammals living in its central Asian homeland, to make them believe there's more cyanide in the seed than there really is. Why not just produce all cyanide? The answer can only be that either too much cyanide is harmful to the seed's own tissues, or that it costs less ATP to synthesize benzaldehyde and so it gives more apparent bang for the buck than real cyanide.

BTW, I'd recommend 'Hall's Hardy' almond for your new place, and that you ignore what you might have read online about it. The thing to do is to try just one near some peaches for pollination. At the least you'll get perhaps the most beautiful flowering "Prunus" you've ever seen, with big, voluptuous flowers cast in a deep pink. If you like the taste you can plant more, as I'm planning on doing. The flavor reminds me of a non-bitter almond that nevertheless have the same strong aroma of benzaldehyde as bitter ones do, and a smidgen of bitterness that seems to vary from place to place. There is no guarantee of their cyanide content, but I realize now that when they're toasted it will become negligible, and salt or honey both help mask the minor trace of bitterness. I had the most wonderful raw almond butter recently, but next time I think I'll roast the kernels first.

Bill





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