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Almond Pudding, Plain
Soak three table-spoonfuls of finely-grated bread-crumbs in milk. Add four ounces of blanched and pounded almonds, a piece of butter the size of an egg melted in a pint of new milk, sugar to taste, a tea-spoonful of grated lemon-rind, a scrape of nutmeg, and three eggs well beaten. A glass of sherry or raisin wine may be added. Place in a pie-dish lined with paste, and bake in a moderate oven. Time, half an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Enough for three or four persons.
A baked almond custard in a pastry case, of the kind Victorian cooks turned out as a plain family sweet. Most of the work is in the almonds; the rest is a straightforward custard that should never be rushed with heat.
- Oven temperatureA "moderate oven" here means about 350F (180C). Any hotter and the egg mixture will curdle and weep before the half hour is up; if the custard begins to dome or crack, it has gone too far.
- Butter the size of an eggTake it as roughly 2 oz, or half a stick. Fats were routinely measured against familiar objects rather than weighed, and an egg-sized piece is usually read as about 2 oz.
- New milkSimply fresh, unskimmed milk straight from the dairy. Whole milk is the correct substitute; the fat matters to the set and the flavour.
- Pounding the almondsFour ounces of blanched almonds can be ground in a food processor, but pulse rather than run it, and add a spoonful of the sugar to absorb the oil. Ground too long they turn to butter and the pudding becomes greasy. Shop-bought ground almonds work, though the texture is finer and less interesting.
- A glass of wineAbout 2 fluid ounces. Raisin wine was a homemade sweet wine common in country houses; a medium or cream sherry, or a sweet Madeira, gives the same effect.
- The pasteAn ordinary shortcrust. The original just lines the dish and bakes; if you find the wet filling leaves the base sodden, blind-baking the shell before filling will help.
- Testing the setHalf an hour suits a shallow pie-dish. The custard is done when the edge is firm and the centre still trembles; it finishes setting as it cools. Serve warm rather than hot.
- Yield and costThree or four portions, as stated. The "probable cost, 1s. 6d." is a period price list, not an instruction, and reflects how dear almonds were relative to milk and eggs.
Almond puddings can be traced through English cookery from the medieval kitchen, where pounded almonds and almond milk supplied richness on fast days when dairy was forbidden, to the Victorian family table where they had become simply a good plain sweet. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the late nineteenth century as a single-volume reference of several thousand entries, characteristically gives several grades of a dish; this is the "plain" version, thickened with breadcrumbs and stretched with milk rather than built on cream and a mass of egg yolks. The costing in shillings and pence is appended to nearly every entry, and it shows almonds sitting firmly in the class of imported goods to be used with a measuring hand.