Home › Dessert › Porcupine Pudding
Porcupine Pudding
Put a sponge cake in a deep glass dish, pour around a glass of brandy and some rasin wine; after it has soaked up the wine and brandy, sprinkle granulated sugar on it, then pour over it a rich custard; fill the top and sides with almonds, blanch them, and put the small ends up.
A trifle in porcupine dress: sponge cake soaked in spirits and sweet wine, drowned in custard, then bristled all over with split almonds. The original assumes you already know how to make a boiled custard, so that is where most of the work sits.
- "A glass" of brandyIn household writing of this period a wine glass is roughly 2 fl oz, so figure about 1/4 cup of brandy and a similar quantity of wine. Add the wine in stages and stop when the cake is saturated but not collapsing.
- Raisin wineA sweet homemade or imported wine made from dried grapes. Malaga, cream sherry, Madeira or a sweet Marsala all sit in the same place on the palate and are the practical substitutes.
- The sponge cakeUse a plain, dry, eggy sponge — ladyfingers or a day-old genoise. A fresh, moist modern butter cake turns to paste under that much liquid.
- "A rich custard"A stirred custard, not a baked one: about 5 egg yolks and 1/4 cup sugar to 2 cups milk or half milk half cream, cooked over low heat until it coats a spoon, around 170-175F. Much above that, roughly 180-185F, it begins to curdle. Strain it and let it cool to lukewarm before pouring, or it will melt the cake into slurry.
- Blanching the almondsCover shelled almonds with boiling water, stand two minutes, drain, and slip the skins off between finger and thumb. The recipe only says to set the small ends up, so whole blanched almonds will do; splitting them lengthwise gives sharper quills if you prefer.
- Setting the quillsPush the almonds in only once the custard has thickened in the cold, or they slide flat. Small ends up, angled slightly toward the top of the dish, and work from the base upward.
- ChillingFour hours in the refrigerator, ideally overnight; the cake needs time to take up the custard as well as the wine.
- YieldA deep quart-and-a-half glass dish serves six to eight. Serve cold, spooned down through all the layers.
This is a trifle under a joke name: the spirits, sweet wine and boiled custard that English cookery had been assembling since the eighteenth century, distinguished only by the spiked almond coat that gave it the porcupine. The device appears in nineteenth-century American and English dessert chapters, where "hedgehog" and "porcupine" pudding seem to have been used more or less interchangeably, sometimes over a moulded almond paste or a whole cooked apple rather than sponge. Blanched almonds were a luxury store-cupboard item, skinned at home, and studding a pudding with them was a visible way of spending money on the table. The reliance on raisin wine points to a household that made or bought sweet fruit wines as a matter of course.