Cake Pudding
Take some stale cake, sponge cake is most desirable, cut it in squares of about two inches, and then slice it through the middle, spreading it over with raspberry jam or strawberry preserves.- Make a custard of a quart of milk, one tablspoonful of corn-starch and the yolks of two eggs, flavoring with vanilla; then beat up the whites to a stiff froth, sweeten them, and stir them lightly into the custard, and pour this over the cake.
A thrift dessert built from cake past its best, close kin to a trifle. The recipe assumes you know how to cook a custard, so the timing and temperatures are left to you.
- The hinge: cook the custard properlyTwo yolks in a quart of milk is a thin custard held together mostly by the cornstarch, so it needs to come to a bare simmer for a minute or two to cook the starch out and thicken. Stir constantly over medium-low heat and pull it the moment it coats a spoon; boiled hard, the yolks curdle and the starch turns pasty.
- Quantities in modern termsA quart is 4 cups of milk. One tablespoon of cornstarch for that much milk gives a pourable sauce, not a set pudding; use two if you want it to hold a shape.
- Sweetening the custardThe original only sweetens the beaten whites, relying on the jam for the rest. Most cooks today will want 1/4 to 1/3 cup sugar in the milk as well, and roughly 2 tablespoons beaten into the whites.
- The whitesFolded raw into hot custard, the whites are only lightly set by the residual heat. If that concerns you, spoon them over the top instead and brown them in a 350F oven for 10 to 12 minutes, as a meringue.
- Whole milk, and scald itNineteenth-century milk was unhomogenised, and generally richer than modern 2 percent, though its fat content varied a good deal from dairy to dairy. Use whole milk, and warm it before adding the starch slurry so the custard comes together evenly.
- The cakeStale sponge is specified because it absorbs custard without collapsing. Fresh, tender cake turns to mush; if yours is fresh, leave the cut squares out uncovered for a few hours.
- Yield and servingA quart of custard will soak roughly half a pound of cake, enough for six to eight; use a dish of two to three quarts. The recipe gives no serving instruction, but an hour or two in the cold lets the cake drink up the custard.
Cake pudding is often described as the American household form of the English trifle, stripped of its sherry and its whipped cream and rebuilt around what a cook actually had in the pantry: dry cake, a jar of jam, milk, and a couple of eggs. Cookbooks of this period assumed leftover cake was a resource, not waste, and the dessert chapters of late nineteenth-century compilations are full of ways to reuse it, along with stale bread, rusks and crackers. The cornstarch is a marker of date: commercial cornstarch is generally said to have become widely available in American kitchens after the mid-1800s, and it appears in custards of this kind in place of some of the eggs. Splitting the squares and spreading them with jam, rather than layering the dish trifle-fashion, means each portion arrives with its own seam of preserves.