Blanch ¼ pound of almonds and pound in a mortar. Then beat 4 eggs with ½ cup of sugar. Add 1 teaspoonful of brandy and a teaspoonful of wine and lemon-juice; add 4 lady fingers crumbled up fine. Beat all together with the nuts; put in a well-buttered pudding-dish and bake. Serve with wine sauce.
March 8 — No. 8
Viennese
A flourless baked nut pudding in the Viennese manner, written in the telegraphic style of a daily calendar cookbook. Almost every process detail has been left to the cook, so a few decisions have to be made before you start.
- Oven and timingNo temperature or time is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, should suit an egg-and-nut batter of this kind; a buttered 1-quart dish will likely take somewhere around 30 to 40 minutes, until set and just barely trembling at the centre. Baking it in a water bath keeps the edges from drying before the middle firms.
- Beat the eggs properlyThis is the hinge. The only lift comes from air, so separate the eggs, beat the yolks with the sugar until pale and thick, whip the whites to soft peaks, and fold them in last with the nuts and crumbs. Whole eggs "beaten with sugar" as written will give a dense, custardy result.
- The almondsBlanching means slipping the skins off after a minute in boiling water. Pounding in a mortar with a spoonful of the sugar keeps the almonds from turning oily; a food processor pulsed in short bursts does the same job. A quarter pound is about 3/4 cup whole almonds, or roughly 1 cup ground.
- Lady fingersFour commercial savoiardi come to roughly an ounce and a half, something under half a cup of crumbs. They stand in for flour and absorb the liquid. Dry, crisp ones crumble better than soft sponge-type fingers.
- Brandy, wine and lemonThe text can be read as a teaspoon of each, or as a single teaspoonful of wine and lemon juice together; either way it is a flavouring, not a liquid component, so do not increase it hoping for a moister pudding. Any dry white wine or sherry works, and the lemon juice cuts the sweetness.
- "Pudding-dish"In cookbooks of this period the term generally means an open, deep baking dish of earthenware or china rather than a covered mould. A 1-quart souffle dish or a deep pie plate is the modern equivalent. Butter it thoroughly and dust it with fine crumbs or ground almonds so the torte releases.
- Wine sauceNone is given here. Period wine sauces vary: some are thickened with butter, sugar and a little flour, others are a cooked mixture of egg yolks, sugar and sweet wine beaten over hot water until foamy, in effect a sabayon. Serve it warm, poured over the portions.
- YieldEnough for four to six as a dessert. It is best warm from the oven; it sinks and stiffens as it cools.
Vienna's reputation for cakes rests partly on nut tortes, in which finely ground almonds or hazelnuts carry the structure that flour carries elsewhere, and this small baked pudding is a homely relation of that family rather than a layered patisserie torte. Ground nuts and dried cake or biscuit crumbs were a standard Central European substitute for flour, a habit usually linked to the Lenten and Passover baking traditions of the region as well as to plain thrift with stale ladyfingers. The compressed, unmeasured style of the instructions is typical of the daily-dish calendar cookbooks popular in America, which assumed a reader who already knew what a moderate oven felt like and what a wine sauce was, and which ranged widely by nation, with an Austrian strudel the day before this entry and a Bavarian salad the day after.