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Quick Pudding
One quart milk, five eggs, five tablespoons flour. Beat the eggs very light, then mix the flour with a little of the milk and eggs, together. After boiling the remainder of the milk, pour it over the eggs, milk and flour stiring well, and bake from one half to three quarters of an hour, in a pretty quick oven. A little pinch of salt. To be eaten with a rich cold sauce, or foam sauce. This is a delicious pudding.
A baked custard thickened with flour rather than sugar — closer to a Yorkshire pudding batter sweetened at the table by its sauce. The technique hinges on tempering.
- Temper, don't scrambleThe scalded milk goes into the eggs in a thin stream while you stir hard, not the other way round. Dumping a quart of near-boiling milk in at once will curdle the eggs and no amount of baking will smooth it out.
- Lump-free flourFive tablespoons is roughly 40 g. Whisk it into a few tablespoons of cold milk to a smooth slurry before it meets the eggs; flour added to hot liquid seizes instantly.
- "Pretty quick oven"Period usage puts a quick oven somewhere around 375-400F, so 400F is a fair reading. That is hot for a custard, but the flour stabilises it. If your oven runs hot, drop to 375F and expect the longer end of the timing.
- VesselA buttered 2-quart baking dish, or a deep pie dish. Set it on a sheet pan — the batter is thin and rises as it sets.
- DonenessPuffed, browned in patches, and just set at the centre when the dish is nudged. A knife inserted an inch from the edge should come out clean; the middle may still wobble slightly and will firm as it cools.
- No sugar in the batterThe recipe adds none; the sweetness comes from the sauce, so serve it with something assertive — a hard sauce, or a "foam sauce," which in this period usually meant egg, sugar and wine or flavouring beaten over hot water until frothy.
- Serve promptlyA pudding risen this high will sink as it cools. Take it to the table within a few minutes of leaving the oven.
- YieldSix to eight servings from a quart of milk.
Puddings of this kind — milk, eggs, a spoonful or two of flour, baked in a dish rather than boiled in a cloth — appear widely in nineteenth-century American cookbooks, and their speed was part of the appeal. The older tradition was the boiled pudding, tied in a floured cloth and hung in a pot for two or three hours; the word "quick" in this title looks like a claim about the cook's afternoon rather than about the dish's ancestry. This one carries no sugar at all, the sweetening being left to a separate sauce made at the last minute — and such sauces are often where the household's butter, wine, brandy or nutmeg went.