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.