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Adelaide Pudding
Put a pint of water and the thinly-peeled rind and juice of a lemon into a saucepan. Bring it slowly to a boil; then take it off the fire and stir into it, while hot, six ounces of butter and a cupful of sugar; mix with it, very gradually and smoothly, half a pound of flour; let it cool; add six well-beaten eggs and a tea-spoonful of baking-powder. Half fill some buttered cups, and bake in a quick oven. Time to bake, about half an hour. Sufficient for one dozen cups. Probable cost, 1s. 4d.
A boiled-paste batter close to a lemon-scented choux, lightened with baking powder and baked in small moulds. The order of operations is what makes it work.
- Cool the paste before the eggsSix eggs stirred into a hot flour paste will scramble and the puddings will be streaked and heavy. Let the mixture come down to barely warm, then beat the eggs in a little at a time, as for choux.
- "A pint"An imperial pint, 20 fl oz, or about 2½ US cups. Half a pound of flour is 8 oz by weight, roughly 1¾ cups; a "cupful" of sugar is about 7 oz.
- "A quick oven"Usually glossed as somewhere around 400-450F. For small moulds set at the higher end and do not open the door for the first 20 minutes, or the risen tops may sink.
- The cupsVictorian "cups" here are dariole moulds or teacup-sized china moulds, roughly 4–5 fl oz. Buttered ramekins or a deep muffin tin work; half filling them is right, since the batter climbs.
- Baking powderVictorian powders were not double-acting and their strength varied from brand to brand. A level teaspoon of current baking powder is plenty for this quantity, and the eggs are doing most of the lifting anyway.
- Lemon rindPeel it in strips with no white pith, steep it in the boiling water, and fish it out before the flour goes in. Left in, the strips make tough threads through the finished pudding.
- Yield and servingTwelve small puddings. They are dry-eating on their own and take a sweet sauce well -- lemon, wine or custard. They are likely to sink as they cool, so serve them hot.
- "Probable cost, 1s. 4d."Sixteen pence for a dozen puddings, in the currency of pre-decimal Britain. It is a pricing note for the household accounts, not an instruction.
The method here -- water and butter boiled, flour beaten in, eggs added once the paste has cooled -- is close to the pâte à choux of French pastry, redirected into a baked pudding rather than piped and left hollow. Cassell's, compiled for middle-class English households in the 1870s and reissued for decades after, is full of such borrowings: continental technique dressed in the plainer language of the English pudding course, and stretched with baking powder, which was commercially available by then and much used in books of this generation to guarantee a rise. The name is decorative rather than descriptive. Victorian dishes were often christened for royal figures, colonies and cities -- Queen Adelaide, consort of William IV, gave her name to the South Australian city -- and there is generally no documented link between such a dish and its namesake.