Line a well-buttered pudding-dish with slices of sponge-cake and cover with peach compote. Make an egg custard and cover with the custard; set in the oven to bake. Beat the whites of 2 eggs with a little lemon-juice and pulverized sugar spread on the top and let brown. Serve cold.
June 26 — No. 26
Swiss
The original assumes you already know how to build a baked custard, so the quantities are entirely up to the cook. Here is what the omissions actually mean in a modern kitchen.
- Scale itFor a 1½-quart dish, figure on about 6 slices of sponge cake, 2 cups of peach compote, and a custard of 3 whole eggs plus 2 yolks (save the whites for the meringue) to 2 cups of scalded milk with 1/3 cup sugar. That serves six.
- Oven temperatureA baked egg custard wants 325F, no hotter. The book's silence on heat is the one real trap: above about 350F the eggs tighten and weep, leaving a watery layer under the meringue.
- Use a water bathSet the pudding-dish in a roasting pan with hot water halfway up the sides. Bake 35-45 minutes, until the custard is set at the edges and still wobbles slightly in a two-inch circle at the centre; it finishes setting as it cools.
- Peach compotePeaches stewed in sugar syrup. Drain yours well, or the liquid thins the custard. Canned peaches in syrup, drained and roughly chopped, are a fair substitute out of season.
- Pulverized sugarPowdered or superfine sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Superfine (caster) sugar dissolves best in the whites; about 4 tablespoons to 2 whites.
- Browning the meringueSpread the meringue to touch the rim of the dish all round so it does not shrink, and return it to a 350-375F oven for 10-15 minutes, or use a broiler for 1-2 minutes with the door open and your eyes on it.
- "Serve cold"Means fully cooled, at least two hours, and preferably not refrigerated overnight — the meringue slumps and beads. Bake it the morning you plan to serve it.
- Sponge cakeStale, slightly dry cake is better than fresh; it absorbs the custard without collapsing to paste. Ladyfingers or a plain pound cake will stand in.
This is one of the 365 short entries in a book that assigns a nation to every day of the year, and the Swiss attribution here is loose in the way such labels often were: what the recipe describes belongs to the queen-of-puddings family — cake or crumbs, fruit, baked custard, meringue lid — which appears across British and continental cookbooks through the nineteenth century under a number of names. Why the entry is called Swiss is not stated. What the entry does tell you plainly is how much the cook was expected to know without being told: no quantities, no oven temperature, no baking time, because "make an egg custard" was assumed knowledge.