Even I suspected it was meant to be a bright red train engine. The toy engines I knew were either sky blue or scarlet and the real ones at Paddington were black or grey. This one was maroon and glittered strangely. Three brighter red candles stood back from the smoke stack and Robert Lockerbie Jr ended up clambering onto the table to blow them out. When I received my slice of the indubitably expensive cake, it tasted as poisonously horrible as it looked to me, the senior at five or six, at the party. I was probably there so that my sister didn’t have to attend. When I mentioned the dreadful cake to my mother later, she smiled funnily and said it was probably marzipan. She added that Mrs Lockerbie ought to know that most children hate it. 

I doubt marzipan was young Robert’s favourite food anyway because that was my little sister’s face.

The Lockerbies were “American millionaires” living in the ground floor flat at our address in London. Robert Jr would look for my sister of about his age. He’d maniacally stroke the velvet of her dress or her fur mittens, even her hair, work himself into some vampiric state and then bite her pink cheeks or her neck.

Marzipan, the way it’s usually eaten in the United States, I now know, is far more sugary, which could have accounted for the glistening on his maroon cake. Marzipan is not created equal all over the world. Places like Toledo and Lubeck that lay claim to the best marzipans in the world have guarantees that their sugar content is always lower than the almond content. In Lübeck’s case it is 30% and its marzipan is sometimes made without any sugar at all. 

For what is marzipan but a mush of ground almonds and sugar, sometimes honey, plus the odd “secret” ingredient, producing its unique taste and a consistency so enticingly smooth and flexible that, unfortunately, it lends itself to the fashioning of supreme kitsch? Or is that all?  

There are two kinds of almonds, sweet (Prunus dulcis) and bitter, the bitter kind (Prunus amar) being the easier to grow. Apricot kernels, often used as a substitute for almonds, and cherry pits share that bitterness and also the accompanying cyanide. Bitter almonds have 42 times the amount of cyanide of sweet ones, which can of course be very little.

At about the same age as I was at the train engine party, I’d received a present of a narrow compartmented box, studded with five perfect fruits and covered with a see-through lid. I’d hoped the little orange, the small pear, outsize strawberry, large glowing apricot and pastel peach were candles.

Image by missingpinky from Pixabay

Candles often came in silly waxy shapes like ducks and fairies, but I couldn’t find any wicks sticking out. It dawned on me after smelling them, since each featured the scent of its distinct fruity shape, that they were soaps. I knew rose and lotus shaped and scented soaps and selected the peach for my next bath. I rubbed it all over my facecloth, dismayed to see it falling apart cakily into the bathwater. Marzipan.

In Toledo are far greater gobsmackers. The city is famous for marzipan pigs and bears, snakes and fish, an entire, more-than-lifesize marzipan Don Quixote in his marzipan armour with lance. The Cafe de las Monja shop features an astonishing  scenario of marzipan nuns making marzipan products and, at the Obrador de Mazapán San Tomé, is a huge scale model, in marzipan of course, of the even more huge and complicatedly decorated interior of the nearby monastery of San Juan de los Reyes. Ah, there’s a kind of reason for the nuns and monks: 

The convents of Toledo are where the marzipan in Spain was made into loaves and doled out to starving people in the late 11th century. Their wheat and food stores had been wiped out in the long battles by the Christians’ endeavour to capture the southern part of the area at any cost to the inhabitants. With no bread even, there was famine. But when life gives you almonds, thanks to the Moors, and, oddly enough, sugar, you make marzipan. At some point they even mixed it with chicken to make the latter go further, something they might have called a sweetmeat but didn’t.

If you’re wondering if they were the first to eat marzipan for any reason, they weren’t. The almond and sugar paste mixture seems to have been created as a curative dietary administration in Persia by a doctor, Rhazes, in the 800s. I wonder if the doctor was aware of the cyanide connection. It wasn’t unusual to use a little poison as a beneficial medicine. In The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, just a few decades after Rhazes’ patients had benefited from taking it, a very similar mixture was being eaten during Ramadan, perhaps also to get up strength after the daily fasting.  

This is where Thomas Aquinas and I come in. Every March on my birthday, I close myself off from any electronics and as many people as possible, to read books all day long as my special treat. I also eat my own favourite foods, like ripe figs and cheese. But I start the languorous day with an espresso and generous slice of marzipan. Yes, I got to love it eventually, after dodging it on fruit cakes and peeling the outsides from petit fours. Perhaps there is something eventually addictive in the hint or even just the whiff of cyanide.   

Image of marzipan petit fours by Ingi Finnsson from Pixabay

“Marzipan does not break the fast.” That’s what Aquinas said. Well, Simnel Cake balls to that, I think every birthday morning as I listen to the birds and help myself to heaven. But I’ve now done the research and the philosopher-theologian was talking to some presumably rather relieved clerics who, a bit like the Ramadan folk mentioned three centuries earlier, had to endure religious fasting. He meant marzipan was so medicinally good for digestion that it was not regarded as a treat, so fasting could continue after eating it and the fast was not regarded as being broken after any gobbling thereof. Neat. 

By then, you will have noted that the substance, medicinal or not, had a name. Even though the calendar had changed since very early (pre-marzipan) Roman days and Martius was no longer the first month of the year, March or Martius was still regarded as the important calendar month, the one that included a loaf of almonds ground up with sugar. Sicilians seem to have been the first to use the name of March bread, Marzipane for that reason. In England they preferred to call it something less foreign sounding, Marchpane. 

Later, marzipan entered Latin, pre-Lenten food traditions, when the festival (goodbye to the feast) or carnival (goodbye to the meat) was often in March.

Image of almond trees in blossom by ValverdeRedactor from Pixabay and (below) image of almond blossom by Michael Gaida from Pixabay

Even when it’s not March, some almost-addictive desire for the scent and taste of marzipan overcomes me. I speed-walk for the 12 minutes it takes me to Chocoloza at 44 Stanley in the Milpark area of Joburg, to get their unbeatable, best-ingredients, dark chocolate-coated marzipan. Or I make it myself, the less sweet Lübeck way, with 3 cups of ground almonds (almond flour is fine but I like the ground almonds releasing at least some of their oils in the processing), 1 cup of castor sugar, whirled together with an egg white until the mixture is mouldable. A teaspoon of rosewater, the Lübeck “secret”  goes in then for another whirl in the processor. The mixture is formed or rolled into a vaguely loaf shape and kept in the fridge, wrapped in a preferably non-plastic wrap for a couple of weeks, if it doesn’t disappear, seemingly by itself.

Lübeck calls itself the “world capital of marzipan”, after creating it for medical reasons initially. Extract of bitter almonds was once used as a medicine but in very small quantities because it could be dangerous or even lethal. In post-Aquinas times apothecaries sold marzipan across Europe. Eventually the treatment started being too much of a treat because the price of sugar was high and availability was restricted. Then beet sugar was developed in Europe so the marzipan price came down in the 18th century and Lübeck didn’t look back.

Today both Toledo and Lübeck use the sweet almonds, as does the USA. Commercially, only sweet almonds are available here but bitter almonds are grown everywhere and sold at markets. When people use sweet almonds in marzipan, they often add almond essence for that extra “almondiness” that comes naturally with the bitter almonds, which could be that cyanidiness. Italian marzipan however uses a mixture of both sweet and bitter almonds, the Italians preferring the original taste and aroma, as they do in Amaretto, made from the bitter almonds and sometimes apricot kernels. So it is that the French enjoy the aroma and flavour imparted by cooking with cherry pits, the reason for using unstoned cherries in their delicious clafoutis.

Someone like Clouseau makes a show of sniffing the air around a corpse. If it smells like bitter almonds – and, in French, a stone fruit pit or kernel is amande – he is convinced that he knows something. And that something is that this man was killed with cyanide. What Clouseau might not know is the poison may have been administered by feeding the man more than 50 bitter almonds, difficult as it might have been to arrange. If the corpse were that of a small child it may have been from a mere 10. 

Children at birthday parties, even if their marzipan is only the fake kind, know what’s not good for them. For me and other adults, somehow, it only adds to the exciting allure of the Bread of March. DM