Boil 1 pint of raspberries and 1 pint of red currants in 2 cups of water until soft; add 3 cups of sugar, some cinnamon, 1 cup of pounded almonds and 1 tablespoonful of chopped citron. Let cook and mash until smooth; then thicken with a little cornstarch. Remove from the fire and pour into a mold. When cold, serve with whipped cream.
A Scandinavian red-berry pudding of the rødgrøt family, set with starch rather than gelatine. The one thing that governs success is the starch: too little and it never sets, too much and it turns gluey.
- Starch quantity is not given"A little cornstarch" is genuinely ambiguous. For the roughly 5 cups of sweetened puree this yields, 3 to 4 tablespoons slaked in cold water is the usual range for a spoonable set; the mixture must return to a full boil for a minute after the slurry goes in, or the starch will not thicken and will taste raw.
- SugarThree cups to a quart of berries is very sweet by current taste, and the sugar is doing structural work as well as flavouring. Cutting it to 1 1/2 cups is reasonable, but expect a softer, looser set.
- Pounded almondsBlanched almonds pounded in a mortar to a coarse paste. Ground almonds or almond meal work; a food processor pulsed briefly is closer to the original texture than almond flour, which disappears into the puree.
- CitronNot the whole fruit but candied citron peel, sold near the glacé fruit at holiday time. Chopped candied lemon peel is the nearest substitute.
- Cinnamon"Some" means about half a teaspoon ground, or a broken stick simmered with the fruit and fished out before moulding.
- Red currantsHard to find fresh outside a farmers' market in high summer. Frozen currants are fine, and their acidity is what keeps the pudding from tasting flat; if you must substitute, use tart red gooseberries or a little more raspberry plus a squeeze of lemon rather than a sweeter berry.
- MouldingRinse the mould with cold water and do not oil it. A starch-set pudding unmoulds cleanly from a wet mould; oil leaves streaks. Chill at least four hours, and press a piece of film onto the surface to stop a skin forming.
- YieldAbout 5 cups, serving six. The whipped cream is not optional trimming — unsweetened cream is what balances the sugar.
Rødgrøt (Norwegian) or rødgrød (Danish) is the northern European family of thickened red-fruit puddings, traditionally made with whatever soft summer fruit was ripe at once — raspberries, red and black currants, cherries — and set with potato starch, sago or, in later books, cornstarch. Eaten cold with cream or milk, it functioned as both dessert and a way of using a glut of berries before they spoiled. The almonds and candied citron here push it toward the festive end of the tradition; a plain household version would be fruit, sugar and starch alone. Its appearance on May 7 probably says more about the publishing format than about Norwegian seasons: calendar cookbooks of this kind assigned one foreign recipe to each day of the year, and a berry pudding may well have seemed a safely recognisable stand-in for a whole cuisine.