Prunus dulcis (synonym Prunus amygdalus); the bitter form is Prunus dulcis var. amara and the sweet form var. dulcis
Origin: The arid foothills and river valleys of the ancient Near East, from the Levant eastward across the Iranian plateau into Central Asia, where the wild almonds of the genus <em>Amygdalus</em> grow
The almond is, despite its long career as a nut, the seed of a stone fruit. Prunus dulcis belongs to the rose family and to the same genus as the peach, the plum, the apricot, and the cherry; what the tree bears is a leathery green drupe, and the almond of commerce is the kernel drawn from the woody stone at its heart, the counterpart of the peach pit, eaten before the surrounding flesh has had the chance to swell and sweeten. It is one species, not a clutch of separate domestications, and its central drama lies not in different kinds of tree but in a single, decisive division within the one species: the difference between the sweet almond and the bitter.
Wild almonds are bitter, and bitterness here is not a matter of taste alone but of poison. The wild kernel is charged with the compound amygdalin, which on crushing and contact with the saliva releases hydrogen cyanide; a few dozen wild almonds hold a lethal dose, and the bitterness is the plant's chemical defence of its seed. That such a tree was ever domesticated at all is one of the quiet marvels of the Neolithic, and the answer lies in a single non-bitter mutation. Now and again a wild almond carries a dominant gene that switches off the amygdalin, yielding a sweet, harmless kernel; the first cultivators, finding such trees, propagated them by seed and later by grafting, and from that selected sweet form descends every eating almond grown today. The bitter almond did not vanish, however. In small, carefully rationed quantities its intense, heady aroma (the very scent the word 'almond' calls to mind) is prized as a flavouring, in the Italian amaretto and the French ratafia, in the bitter heart of true marzipan, and in the almond extract of the baker, where the toxin is driven off or diluted to safety.
The sweet almond is itself grown in a great range of named varieties, selected over centuries for the qualities that each tradition prizes. Spain raised the round, flat, sweet Marcona and the long Largueta; Italy the Avola almonds of south-eastern Sicily, the Pizzuta and the Fascionello, prized above all others by the confectioner; California, latterly the giant of the trade, the Nonpareil, soft-shelled and uniform, bred for the orchard and the machine. The almond tree is the earliest of all the orchard trees to flower, breaking into white and pale-pink blossom while the winter is barely over, and this precocious, vulnerable flowering, beautiful and easily killed by a late frost, has shaped both its cultivation and its long symbolic life.
From its Near Eastern cradle the almond travelled in two great ages, the first ancient and the second medieval, and the second mattered more for the kitchen than the first. In antiquity the cultivated sweet almond spread westward out of the Levant: into Greece, where Theophrastus described its cultivation and the Greeks pounded it into honeyed sweets; and on to Rome, which knew it as the nux graeca, the 'Greek nut', planted it across Italy, and carried it to the edges of the empire. Almonds lay among the offerings in the tomb of Tutankhamun; they are named in the Hebrew Bible as a gift fit for a ruler. Yet the Roman almond remained, for the most part, a nut to be cracked and eaten, a thickener and a garnish; the transformation of the almond into the foundation of an entire confectionery was the work of a later world.
That work was Arab. The cooks and physicians of the Abbasid Caliphate, drawing on the Persian and Levantine traditions they had inherited, made the almond central to their kitchen in two enduring forms. The first was almond milk, the pale liquor pressed from ground blanched almonds and water, which kept where dairy spoiled and which carried no meat, so that it could be used on fast days and in the heat of the East alike. The second was the marriage of pounded almond and sugar, the lauzinaj of the Baghdad cookbooks, a paste of almond and sugar wrapped in the thinnest pastry that is the direct ancestor of both baklava and marzipan. From the Arab heartland these techniques spread along the whole arc of Islam: west across North Africa to Morocco, whose almond-and-sugar pastries are amongst the finest in the world; into Sicily, conquered by the Arabs in the ninth century, where the almond became latte di mandorla and the moulded marzipan fruits of the Martorana; and into Al-Andalus, Moorish Spain, whence the ground almond entered the cold soup ajo blanco, the Galician tart of Saint James, and the great Christmas confection turrón.
It was from Moorish Spain and Arab Sicily that medieval Christian Europe received the almond in its transformed state. Almond milk became the indispensable ingredient of the medieval European kitchen, used on the Church's many fast days in place of the forbidden milk and butter; the blancmange, a dish of almond milk thickened with rice and shredded capon, stood at the centre of the aristocratic table from England to Italy. Marzipan, carried north by the Hanseatic almond trade, took root in the German lands, above all at Lübeck, and in the marzipan ring cakes of Scandinavia. In France the almond matured into the bedrock of the pâtisserie, the frangipane of the galette des rois, the calisson of Aix, the macaron and the financier. Eastward, the Persianate Mughals carried the badam, the Persian almond, into India, where it enriched the milk sweets and the celebration rice of the imperial kitchen. And at the last the almond crossed the Atlantic: Spanish Franciscan missionaries planted it in Alta California in the eighteenth century, and from those mission trees grew the orchards of the Central Valley that now bear the overwhelming majority of all the almonds in the world.
The almond is today both an industrial commodity of staggering scale and a luxury of the confectioner, and the gap between its two lives is wide. California alone grows roughly four-fifths of the world's almonds, a million and more acres of orchard in the Central Valley pollinated each spring by the largest managed migration of honey-bees on earth; Spain, Australia, and the lands of the Mediterranean and the Near East make up most of the rest. The bulk of this vast crop is sold shelled and blanched, roasted and salted as a snack, slivered and flaked for the baker, milled into almond flour, ground into almond butter, and, in the most striking recent development, pressed and strained into almond milk, the plant-based drink that has carried the ancient Arab technique into the refrigerator of every supermarket in the Western world.
In the kitchen the almond keeps a double character that no other nut quite shares. It is the great nut of the cold table and the sweet: ground into marzipan and the almond pastes of a dozen national confectioneries, baked into the Spanish tarta de Santiago, the Sicilian and Lübeck marzipan fruits, the Norwegian kransekake, the French galette des rois, the Moroccan kaab el ghazal, and the Indian badam halwa; pounded into the cold soups of Andalusia; steeped into the latte di mandorla and the orgeat of the Mediterranean summer. Yet it is equally at home in the savoury kitchen, fried golden and scattered over the festive rice and tagines of Persia, Morocco, and Mughal India, pounded into the picada that thickens a Catalan stew, and crusted over a fillet of trout in the French amandine. The bitter almond, rationed to a few drops or a single kernel, lends its haunting note to the amaretto of Saronno, the ratafias and noyaux of France, and the marzipan that would taste of nothing without it. From a poisonous wild seed tamed by a single fortunate mutation, the almond has become one of the most versatile and most universally grown of all the foods carried out of the ancient Near East.
Historical Journey of Almond
The Levant (Greater Syria and the Jordan Highlands) — c. 3000 BCE
The almond was domesticated in the ancient Near East, and the Levant lies at the heart of its homeland: the arid hills and river valleys of Greater Syria, the Jordan highlands, and the wider Fertile Crescent fringe, where the wild almonds of the genus Amygdalus still grow. The decisive event of that domestication was not the bringing of the tree into the orchard but the taming of its poison. The wild almond is bitter and lethal, its kernel charged with amygdalin that releases hydrogen cyanide when crushed; the cultivated almond exists only because a single dominant mutation, found now and again in a wild tree, switches that poison off and yields a sweet, harmless kernel. The first farmers of the Levant found such trees, propagated them, and so created from a poisonous seed one of the oldest of all the orchard crops. Charred almonds appear at Bronze Age sites across the region, and the almond is named in the Hebrew Bible both as a gift fit for a ruler and as the watchful tree, 'shaqed', the first to break into blossom at winter's end.
In the Levantine kitchen the almond has never been only a sweet. The tender green almond, the whole unripe fruit picked in spring while the shell is still soft and the kernel a jelly, is eaten raw with a little salt across Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, a fleeting seasonal delicacy of the Levantine table. The ripe kernel is blanched and ground for the region's pastries and its milk puddings, and it is the prized filling of the maamoul, the festival shortbread of semolina pressed in carved wooden moulds and stuffed with date, walnut, pistachio, or, in its most luxurious form, with sweetened almond. Maamoul bil loz, the almond-filled maamoul baked for Easter and for Eid alike, is the almond's oldest sweet expression in the land of its origin.
Isfahan and the Iranian Plateau, Persia — c. 500 BCE
The wild almonds of the genus Amygdalus reach across the Iranian plateau into Central Asia, and the almond has been part of the Persian table from the earliest times; the Persian word for it, 'badam', is one of the great names of the nut, the one the Mughals would later carry into India. The almond grew in the royal orchards of the Achaemenids alongside the pistachio, the pomegranate, and the quince, the canonical fruits of the Persian garden, and it has held its place in the Iranian kitchen, sweet and savoury alike, ever since.
The Persian spring brings the chaqaleh badam, the green almond eaten whole with salt while the shell is still soft, sold from barrows on the streets of Tehran and Isfahan as the first fruit of the year. The ripe almond is blanched, slivered, and fried golden to crown the jewelled celebration rice of the Persian feast, scattered with barberries, pistachios, and saffron over the shirin polo and the morasa polo of the wedding table; it is steeped and ground into the milk puddings and the saffron-scented sholeh zard of Nowruz and Muharram. Above all the almond is the Persian sweet of marriage and good fortune. The noghl, the sugar-coated almond perfumed with rose water, is the confetti showered over a bride and groom; and the toot, the little marzipan mulberries of almond paste and sugar, moulded and rolled in sugar and tipped with a stem of pistachio, are amongst the most refined of all the sweets of the Persian New Year.
Athens and the Aegean, Classical Greece — c. 350 BCE
The cultivated sweet almond moved west out of the Levant into the Greek world, where it became one of the staple nuts of the ancient Mediterranean. Theophrastus, the father of botany and successor of Aristotle, described the almond tree and its cultivation around 300 BCE, distinguishing the sweet kind from the bitter and noting the grafting and tending that improved the crop. The Greeks pounded the kernel with honey into early sweetmeats, the ancestors of a confectionery line that has never been broken; and they wove the almond into myth, telling of the abandoned Phyllis transformed into a bare almond tree that burst into flower when her lover at last embraced its trunk, an image read ever afterwards into the tree's habit of blossoming first and alone at the end of winter.
Greece has kept the almond at the centre of its sweet table to this day, above all on the islands and at the great rites of passage. The amygdalota, the soft, chewy almond macaroons of ground almond, sugar, and egg white, often scented with rose water and shaped into little pears or crescents, are the wedding and christening sweet of Hydra, Andros, and the Cyclades, dusted thickly in icing sugar and offered to every guest. Sugared almonds, the koufeta, are pressed upon those same guests in odd-numbered handfuls as the favour of the feast, and the almond crowns the spoon sweets, the syrup-preserved fruits with which a Greek household welcomes a visitor, an almond pushed into the heart of each glazed baby apple of the glyko milo.
Rome and the Italian Peninsula — c. 50 CE
Rome received the almond from the Greek east and knew it as the nux graeca, the 'Greek nut'. The Romans planted it across Italy and carried it to the provinces of the empire; Pliny the Elder described several kinds, and the cookery collection attributed to Apicius used ground and whole almonds as a thickener, a stuffing, and a garnish, pounding them into sauces and pressing them into fruit. Almonds were strewn, sugared in honey, at Roman weddings, an early form of the confetto that the Mediterranean has showered on its brides ever since; and the almond entered the Roman repertoire of stuffed and dressed fruit, the dulcia of the banquet table.
The almond never left Italy after Rome fell, and the Italian peninsula remains one of its true homelands. Among the dishes that carry the Roman taste forward is the stuffed dried fig, the fig split and filled with a paste of pounded almond and baked or pressed for keeping, a preparation of clear ancient pedigree that survives across southern Italy. Italy would go on, after the Arab transformation of the almond reached Sicily, to become one of the supreme almond confectioneries of the world; but the foundation was laid in antiquity, when Rome took the Greek nut, spread it the length of its empire, and fixed it in the European larder.
Baghdad, Abbasid Caliphate — c. 800 CE
It was in the Arab world, and above all in the Baghdad of the Abbasid Caliphate, that the almond was raised from a nut to the foundation of an entire confectionery, in a transformation that would reshape the sweet kitchens of three continents. The cooks and physicians of the ninth and tenth centuries, inheriting the Persian and Levantine almond traditions, developed two techniques of lasting consequence. The first was almond milk: blanched almonds ground with water and strained to a pale, rich liquor that kept where dairy spoiled, carried no meat for the days of fasting, and stood in for milk and cream across the medieval kitchens of both Islam and Christendom. The second was the deliberate marriage of pounded almond and sugar, newly abundant from the Arab sugar plantations, into a smooth paste.
The Baghdad cookbooks, the Kitab al-Tabikh of Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq foremost among them, record that paste in the form of lauzinaj, from 'lawz', the Arabic for almond: a filling of ground almond and sugar scented with rose water, enclosed in the thinnest leaves of pastry, soaked in syrup, and cut into lozenges. Lauzinaj is the direct ancestor of two of the world's great sweets, the layered nut pastry that became baklava and the moulded almond-sugar paste that became marzipan. The Abbasid table also kept the almond in its savoury register, fried golden and scattered over the sweet-and-sour braises of lamb and fruit, the sikbaj, that were the prestige dishes of the caliph's kitchen. From Baghdad these techniques travelled the length of the Islamic world, west to Spain and Sicily and the Maghreb, and so at last to Christian Europe.
Córdoba, Al-Andalus (Moorish Spain) — c. 950 CE
The Arab conquest of the Iberian Peninsula carried the almond and its confectionery into Al-Andalus, where the warm soils of Andalucía, Valencia, and Murcia proved ideal for the tree, and where eight centuries of Moorish cultivation made the almond one of the defining ingredients of Spanish cooking. The Andalusi kitchen used ground almond exactly as Baghdad had taught: pounded into milk and into sweetened pastes, blended into cold and hot soups, and fried whole into savoury dishes. From this inheritance descend some of the most distinctive almond dishes of Europe.
Ajo blanco, the cold white soup of Málaga, is older than gazpacho and entirely medieval in its makings: blanched almonds, garlic, bread, oil, and vinegar blended to a silky emulsion and served ice-cold with grapes, a dish that predates the tomato in Spain and preserves the Moorish almond soup unchanged. The almond binds the picada that thickens the stews of the Andalusian and Catalan kitchen, as in the Lenten pumpkin potaje, and it is pressed with figs into the keeping cakes of the south, the pan de higo. Beyond Andalucía the almond gave Spain two of its supreme sweets: the turrón of Alicante and Jijona, the nougat of almond and honey that is the confection of the Spanish Christmas, descended directly from the Arab almond pastes; and, in the Christian north of Galicia, the tarta de Santiago, the flourless almond cake stamped with the cross of Saint James, made wholly of ground almond, sugar, and egg.
Avola and Syracuse, Sicily — c. 1000 CE
The Arab conquest of Sicily, begun in the ninth century, carried the almond and its sweet techniques onto the island, and Sicily made of the almond a regional identity as deep as any in the world. The south-eastern corner of the island, around Avola, Noto, and Syracuse, grows the most prized confectionery almonds of Europe, the flat Pizzuta d'Avola and the sweeter Fascionello and Romana, whose fine flavour the pastry-makers of the island and beyond seek above all others. From the Arab inheritance, deepened under the Norman kings who followed, Sicily built an almond confectionery of extraordinary range.
The latte di mandorla, the almond milk of the Arab kitchen, became the island's beloved summer drink, the blanched almonds pounded and steeped and sweetened, served cold and sometimes set as a delicate blancmange or churned into granita; the granita di mandorle, the almond ice of a Sicilian breakfast taken with a warm brioche, is one of the island's defining pleasures. The frutta martorana, the marzipan moulded and painted into astonishingly lifelike fruits at the convent of the Martorana in Palermo and sold for the feast of All Souls, is the highest art of the European almond paste. And the almond runs through the cassata and the cannoli, the torrone and the soft amaretti, of the Sicilian pastry shop, an island cuisine that the almond, more than any other ingredient, made its own.
Marrakech and Fez, Morocco — c. 1100 CE
Across the Strait of Gibraltar the almond confectionery of Al-Andalus met and merged with that of the Maghreb, and Morocco became one of the supreme almond kitchens of the world. The shared Andalusi-Moroccan tradition, enriched after 1492 by the Muslim and Jewish exiles who fled Christian Spain for Fez and the cities of the north, raised the almond to the centre of Moroccan festive cooking, sweet and savoury alike. Almonds are blanched, fried in oil or toasted, ground to a paste, and worked into the pastries, tagines, and ceremonial dishes of every celebration.
The gazelle horns, kaab el ghazal, the slender crescent pastries filled with almond paste scented with orange-flower water and cinnamon, are the queen of Moroccan sweets, served at weddings and at the feasts of Ramadan; sellou, the toasted flour, sesame, and almond sweetmeat, is pressed into dense mounds to break the Ramadan fast and to celebrate a birth. In the savoury kitchen the fried almond crowns the great dishes: the b'stilla, the imperial pie of Fez in which shredded pigeon or chicken is layered with a sugared, cinnamon-scented almond filling under crackling warqa pastry; the festive lamb tagine mrouzia, dark with honey and ras el hanout and studded with fried almonds and raisins; and the celebratory couscous tfaya, crowned with caramelised onions, raisins, and golden almonds. And amlou, the rich spread of toasted almonds ground with the Moroccan argan oil and honey, is the almond butter of the Berber south, eaten with bread at breakfast across the Souss.
Medieval England and Northern France — c. 1390 CE
Medieval Christian Europe received the almond in its transformed Arab state, by way of Moorish Spain, Norman Sicily, and the returning Crusaders, and made it one of the most important ingredients of the high medieval kitchen. The reason was the Church calendar. For nearly half the days of the year the faithful were forbidden milk, butter, cream, and eggs, and almond milk, pressed from ground almonds and water, was the perfect substitute: it had the richness of dairy and broke no fast, and so it poured through the cookery of Lent and the fast days in soups, sauces, pottages, and puddings. The great cookery manuscripts of the age, the English Forme of Cury of around 1390 and the French Ménagier de Paris, call for almonds and almond milk on page after page.
The defining dish of this almond kitchen was the blancmange, the 'white dish': a pale, delicate pottage of almond milk thickened with rice and, on flesh days, enriched with the white meat of a capon, sugared and sometimes coloured and gilded for the feast. It stood among the most prestigious preparations of the aristocratic table from England to Italy, and its name and its whiteness survive in the cold almond and milk puddings called blancmange to this day. Alongside it the medieval cooks baked the almond into tarts and custards, ground it with cinnamon and sugar into the rich spiced tarts of the late medieval table, and pounded it into the marzipan, the 'marchpane', that crowned the banquet as a moulded and gilded subtlety. From this medieval foundation grew the almond pâtisserie of France and the marzipan of the German and Nordic north.
Lübeck and the Hanseatic North, Germany — c. 1400 CE
The marzipan of the medieval Mediterranean travelled north on the trade of the Hanseatic League, the great merchant confederation of the Baltic and the North Sea, and took root in the German lands, where it became a confection of civic pride. The free city of Lübeck, the queen of the Hanse, made marzipan its own to such a degree that Lübecker Marzipan now carries a protected European designation; the legend, almost certainly untrue but lovingly preserved, holds that the city's confectioners invented it during a famine when only almonds and sugar remained in the storehouses. Whatever its origin, Lübeck marzipan, with its high proportion of fine almond and its restrained sweetness, became the standard of the art, moulded into fruits, loaves, and figures, glazed and gilded, and above all bound up with Christmas.
German and Central European baking wove the almond through the whole festive calendar. The marzipan is rolled into the heart of the Dresden Christstollen, the dense fruited Christmas loaf, and moulded into the marzipan potato and the marzipan pig of the New Year; ground almonds enrich the spiced Lebkuchen of Nuremberg, the soft honey-and-spice gingerbread baked on wafer since the Middle Ages; and the almond crowns the Bethmännchen of Frankfurt and a hundred other Christmas biscuits. From the German lands the marzipan and the almond Christmas baking passed onward into Scandinavia and the Baltic, carrying the nut of the warm Mediterranean into the cold confectionery of the north.
Agra and the Mughal Court, India — c. 1580 CE
The almond entered the high cuisine of the Indian subcontinent with the Mughals, the Persian-speaking dynasty of Central Asian origin who carried the whole Persianate culinary tradition, and its dependence on nuts, into India. They brought with them the Persian word for the almond, badam, which is its name across northern India to this day, and the Persian habit of treating the almond as a luxury of celebration: ground to enrich and thicken, slivered and fried to garnish, and steeped into milk. The almond found a natural home in Kashmir, whose cool valleys grow the finest Indian almonds, and in the rich kitchens of the Mughal cities of the plains.
The Mughal almond is above all a thing of milk and sweetness. Badam halwa, the dense, ghee-rich fudge of ground almond cooked down with milk, sugar, saffron, and cardamom, is the prestige sweet of the North Indian celebration and the winter table; badam doodh, hot almond milk fragrant with saffron and cardamom, is the restorative drink of the Mughlai winter, and its cold cousin, the spiced almond thandai, the drink of the spring festival of Holi. The slivered almond, fried golden in ghee, crowns the jewelled celebration rice of the court, the zafrani pulao of Kashmir scattered with saffron, almonds, and dried fruit; and the almond garnishes the kheer and the kulfi, the festive milk sweets, and the rich kormas of the Mughlai table. Even the pink salt tea of Kashmir, the noon chai of every Kashmiri morning, is crowned with crushed almonds.
Oslo and the Nordic Countries — c. 1700 CE
The almond, a stranger to the cold Nordic climate that could never grow it, became nonetheless one of the most beloved ingredients of the Scandinavian festive table, carried north as a luxury import on the German and Baltic trade and woven deep into the baking of Christmas. Where the German lands had taken up marzipan, so did Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, and the Nordic confectioners made of the almond paste something distinctively their own: the kransekake, the 'wreath cake', a tower of concentric almond-paste rings stacked from broad base to slender crown, iced in fine white loops and broken apart and shared at weddings, christenings, and above all at the New Year, the grandest of all the Scandinavian celebration cakes.
The almond runs through the whole Nordic Christmas. It is ground into the marzipan rolled inside the Norwegian julekake and the Danish kransekake; a single whole blanched almond is hidden in the great bowl of Christmas rice pudding, the Danish risalamande and the Norwegian and Swedish risgrøt, and whoever finds it wins the marzipan pig and the luck of the year; and ground and flaked almonds enrich the spiced Christmas biscuits and the Lucia buns of the Advent table. From an almond that no Nordic orchard could ever grow, the north built one of the warmest of all the world's traditions of almond baking, bound entirely to the dark midwinter feast.
Paris and Provence, France — c. 1850 CE
France took the almond from the medieval European inheritance and made it the bedrock of the most refined pastry tradition in the world. Where the Middle Ages had used almond milk and marchpane, the French pâtissier built on ground almond a whole architecture of creams, sponges, and pastes that defines the craft to this day. The foundation of it all is frangipane, the almond cream of butter, sugar, egg, and ground almond that fills the galette des rois, the puff-pastry cake baked for Epiphany and hiding the lucky charm, the fève; the same almond cream beds the fruit of the tarte Bourdaloue and the tarte aux pêches, and the same ground almond is the flour of the financier and the macaron, the meringue sandwich that is the emblem of the modern French patisserie.
In the warm south the almond keeps an older, Mediterranean character closer to its Arab roots. The calisson d'Aix-en-Provence, the smooth lozenge of almond paste blended with candied Provençal melon and orange, sealed on a wafer and glazed with royal icing, is the pride of Aix and one of the great almond sweets of Europe; the nougat de Montélimar, the white nougat of almond, honey, and egg white, is the cousin of the Spanish turrón; and the praline and the dragée, the sugared and the caramel-coated almond, carry the ancient wedding sweet into the French confiserie. From the humblest amande and the bitter-almond ratafia to the architecture of the grand pâtisserie, the almond is, in France, an ingredient of national art.
The Central Valley, California, United States — c. 1850 CE
The almond reached the New World with the Spanish, carried as cuttings by the Franciscan missionaries who planted Mediterranean orchards along the California mission chain in the later eighteenth century, the same hands that brought the olive and the grape. The cool, fog-bound coast did not suit the early-blossoming tree, but when the orchards moved inland to the hot, dry, frost-protected floor of the Central Valley in the nineteenth century, the almond found one of the most perfect growing climates on earth. From those beginnings California has become the overwhelming giant of the almond world, growing on the order of four-fifths of the entire global crop across more than a million acres, pollinated each February by the largest managed movement of honey-bees ever assembled.
This industrial abundance reshaped how the world eats the almond. California turned the nut into a year-round commodity: the roasted and salted snack, the slivered and flaked baking almond, the almond flour of the gluten-free kitchen, the almond butter, and, above all, the almond milk that revived the ancient Arab technique on a vast modern scale and now fills the dairy aisles of the West. In the California kitchen itself the almond belongs to the fresh, market-driven cooking of the state, expressed most characteristically in the almond and olive oil cake, moist and barely sweet, made with the orchard's own nut and the valley's own oil and eaten, in the Californian way, with freshness and intention.
Melbourne and the Sunraysia District, Australia — c. 2015 CE
Australia has become, quietly and quickly, the second-largest grower of almonds in the world, its orchards concentrated in the irrigated Sunraysia and Riverina districts along the Murray-Darling, where the hot, dry summers and cold winters mirror the Californian climate that the industry took as its model, planting the same Nonpareil variety and drawing on the same orchard technology. From the 1970s and 1980s the plantings spread across the border country of Victoria, New South Wales, and South Australia, and by the present century Australia was exporting almonds across Asia and the Middle East in great quantity.
The almond's most distinctive place in modern Australian life, however, is not in the orchard but in the café. The flat white, the espresso drink under a thin layer of silky microfoam that Australia and New Zealand gave the coffee world, is a national institution, and the coffee culture of Melbourne in particular is amongst the most exacting anywhere. As that culture embraced plant milks through the 2010s, almond milk became the most popular dairy-free choice in Australian cafés, and the almond flat white took its place on every café board in the country. Steaming almond milk to a glossy microfoam is a craft in itself, the milk being leaner and more apt to split than dairy, and the barista almond milk developed for the purpose, with its higher almond content and stabilisers, is now a fixture of the Australian café. It is the newest chapter in the almond's long history: the ancient Near Eastern nut, first pressed into milk by the medieval Arab kitchen, poured at last over coffee in the cafés of the southern land that now helps to grow it.
