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Angel Pudding
Beat two ounces of butter to a cream, with two ounces of powdered sugar; stir in two ounces of flour, the yolks of two eggs, half a pint of new milk, and lastly the whites of the eggs beaten stiff. Pour the mixture in some buttered patty-pans, and bake in a quick oven a quarter of an hour. Sprinkle with sifted sugar, and serve on a napkin. Lemon should be handed round with them. Probable cost, 1s.
A small baked batter pudding lightened with beaten whites — closer to a soufflé than to a cake, and it behaves like one. Work quickly once the whites go in and have the oven already hot.
- Fold, don't stirThe recipe says "lastly the whites of the eggs beaten stiff", and that is the hinge. Fold them into the thin batter in two additions with a spatula; beating them in collapses the foam and you get a dense custardy puck instead of a risen pudding.
- A quick ovenConventionally glossed as roughly 400-450F (200-230C); the book itself gives no temperature. Fifteen minutes at that heat suits small moulds; the tops should be domed and set. They are likely to sink shortly after leaving the oven, which is normal for this style.
- Patty-pansSmall shallow tart or bun tins. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works, filled about two-thirds; deep popover tins also suit. Butter them generously and heat nothing in advance.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, or 285 ml. Against 2 oz each of butter, sugar and flour this makes a genuinely thin batter — that is intended, not an error.
- New milkSimply fresh whole milk, as opposed to milk that had stood and thrown up its cream. Ordinary whole milk is the equivalent; skimmed milk gives a thinner, tougher result.
- Sifted sugarFine sugar passed through a sieve and dusted over the hot puddings; icing (confectioners') sugar does the job. The "powdered sugar" called for earlier means sugar crushed and sifted fine for creaming, closer to today's caster sugar than to granulated.
- Lemon handed roundWedges of lemon passed at the table, to be squeezed over. Lemon sugar or a spoonful of lemon curd serves the same purpose if you would rather not pass fruit.
- Yield and timingRoughly eight to ten small puddings, enough for about four. Best served straight from the oven; they sink as they cool and do not reheat well.
- Probable costOne shilling for the whole dish — the book routinely priced recipes so a housekeeper could budget. It is a costing note, not an instruction.
Cassell's carried dozens of small baked and boiled puddings distinguished mainly by their proportion of egg to flour, and "angel" was often used for things made pale and light with stiffly beaten whites. What is described here is essentially a batter enriched with creamed butter and sugar and aerated with meringue, baked in small patty-pans of the kind used for tarts. Serving on a folded napkin was ordinary practice for hot dry dishes. The costing at the end, one shilling, reflects the book's audience of middle-class households running to a fixed weekly figure, for whom a sweet course could be built from two eggs and half a pint of milk.