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Sponge Cake Pudding
Fill your dish with lady fingers, then make a custard of one quart milk and four eggs, pour over the cake and bake as you would a common custard. It is a very light and delicate pudding. Pieces of stale sponge cake make a nice pudding made in this way. No sauce required, though some might like it better with sauce.
A stale-cake pudding of the plainest kind: soaked ladyfingers under a baked custard. The original assumes you know how to bake "a common custard," which is where all the difficulty actually lies.
- The hinge: low heat and a water bathFour eggs to a quart of milk is a soft set, and it will curdle if pushed. Bake at 325F in a pan of hot water reaching halfway up the dish, and pull it when the centre still wobbles slightly — roughly 45 to 60 minutes for a 2-quart dish.
- No sugar is givenThe recipe is silent on it, though modern palates will want 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar dissolved in the milk. A pinch of salt and a teaspoon of vanilla or a grating of nutmeg are in keeping.
- LadyfingersThe dry, crisp Italian-style savoiardi are closest to what was meant and hold their shape in the custard. The soft supermarket kind will dissolve into the milk, which is not fatal but gives a denser pudding.
- Scald the milkHeat the milk to just below a simmer, then whisk it slowly into the beaten eggs. This shortens the baking time and gives a smoother set than starting with cold milk.
- Let the cake soakPour the custard over and wait ten minutes before it goes into the oven, so the ladyfingers draw up liquid instead of floating in a dry layer on top.
- "Your dish"A 2 quart baking dish, deep rather than shallow. This quantity serves six to eight.
- Sauce, if you want itThe recipe does not say what sauce was meant, only that some might prefer one. It is genuinely better plain and cold.
Puddings built on stale cake or bread were the standard answer to the problem of leftovers in a household that baked constantly and threw nothing away, and this one sits at the genteel end of that tradition: ladyfingers rather than crusts, custard rather than a batter. Ladyfingers themselves — the light, finger-shaped sponge biscuits called savoiardi in Italian and boudoirs in some English books — were a staple of nineteenth-century dessert cookery, used to line charlottes and trifles and sold by confectioners when cooks did not care to pipe them. The recipe's shrug at the end, that stale sponge cake will do as well, is the real point of the entry: it is a formula for a component you already have going spare.