Take ½ pound of almonds and pound in a mortar. Mix with 6 yolks of eggs and a cup of sugar, 1 tablespoonful of lemon-juice, 1 tablespoonful of brandy, 3 slices of stale cake-crumbs and the whites of the eggs beaten stiff. Put in a well-buttered pudding-dish and bake in a slow oven until done.
September 23 — No. 23
French
A baked almond sponge-pudding leavened only by beaten egg whites, so the folding and the low oven are the whole technique. The original text is terse even by 1900 standards; a few of its measures need interpretation.
- The hinge: do not overwork the almondsHalf a pound of blanched almonds pounded in a mortar will turn to oily paste if worked too long. Pound (or pulse in a food processor) with a spoonful of the sugar to keep the mixture dry and mealy. Store-bought almond flour, 8 oz, works as a substitute.
- "A slow oven"300–325F. This pudding is essentially an egg foam; a hotter oven sets the crust before the centre cooks and the whole thing collapses on cooling.
- "3 slices of stale cake-crumbs"Genuinely vague. Reading it as crumbs from thick slices of a plain pound or sponge cake, figure about 1 cup of dry crumbs. Their job is to absorb moisture, so err on the dry side rather than adding liquid.
- Order of assemblyBeat the yolks with the sugar until pale, then work in the almonds, lemon juice, brandy and crumbs. The whites go in last, folded in two or three additions, following the order in which the recipe lists them.
- Dish and depthA well-buttered 1½–2 quart dish, filled no more than two-thirds. Dust the buttered dish with fine crumbs or sugar so the pudding can climb the sides. A water bath is not called for and is not needed here.
- "Until done"Roughly 45–55 minutes at 325F for a 2-quart dish. It is done when the top is set and lightly browned and a skewer in the centre comes out with no wet batter; a faint wobble is fine, it firms as it cools.
- Almonds and bitternessIf a period source calls for "bitter almonds" in a pudding of this kind, substitute a few drops of almond extract. This recipe does not, and sweet almonds alone give a mild result — the lemon and brandy are carrying the flavour.
- Yield and servingSix to eight servings. Serve warm, within an hour of baking, with cold cream, a custard sauce, or nothing at all; it deflates and densifies overnight.
Baked almond puddings ran through French and English cookery for centuries before this calendar picked one up, descending from the medieval European habit of treating pounded almonds as a rich, meatless thickener — the same lineage that produced blancmange and marzipan. This version relies on beaten whites for lift instead of suet, flour or a boiling cloth, closer in construction to a soufflé pudding than to a Christmas pudding, though beaten-white almond puddings appear in English cookery as well. Almonds still had to be blanched and pounded at home, so the mortar work in the first line was ordinary kitchen labour rather than an eccentricity. The book's format — one dish per calendar day, each tagged with a nationality — promised the housekeeper a year of variety without much explanation, which is why the instructions here assume a cook who already knows what a slow oven feels like.