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Apricot Pudding of Tinned Apricots
Take one and a half ounces of cornflour, two eggs, two and a half ounces of sifted sugar, one pint of milk, and half a tin of preserved apricots. Mix the cornflour with a little of the cold milk, then add the rest, and boil for ten minutes. Remove the saucepan from the fire and let it cool, then add the yolks of the eggs and some of the syrup from the apricots, and bake for fifteen minutes. Beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, together with an ounce of sifted sugar. Put a layer of apricots over the baked cornflour, and spread the stiff whites over all, making it look as rocky as possible. Put into the oven to brown for four or five minutes. Serve hot or cold. Sufficient for four persons. Probable cost, 8d.
A cornflour custard baked, topped with fruit and meringue — essentially a queen of puddings with starch standing in for breadcrumbs. The measurements are imperial and the oven directions are vague, so both need translating.
- Cornflour is cornstarchBritish cornflour is the fine white starch sold in the United States as cornstarch, not maize flour. An ounce and a half is roughly 40 g, or a scant third of a cup.
- The pint is imperialCassell's pint is 20 fluid ounces, about 2.5 US cups (570 ml). Using a 16 oz US pint will give a noticeably stiffer set.
- Ten minutes of boilingCornstarch thickens fully within two or three minutes of the boil; the longer cooking may be intended to cook out the raw starch taste. Either way it must be stirred constantly over gentle heat or it will catch and turn grainy on the bottom.
- Cool before the yolksThis is the hinge. Adding yolks to a boiling starch base scrambles them into threads; let the pan drop to hand-warm first, then beat them in with the apricot syrup.
- Oven temperaturesThe recipe gives no oven setting. For the fifteen-minute bake a moderate oven, around 350F (180C), in a buttered shallow dish of about 1.5 pints will do; for the four or five minutes of browning use a hot oven and watch it, since the meringue tips colour fast.
- Half a tinVictorian fruit tins varied in size, commonly a pound or more. A modern 400 g / 14 oz tin of apricot halves, drained, gives about the right quantity if you use most of it; reserve two or three tablespoons of the syrup for the custard.
- The meringueAn ounce of sugar to two whites is a soft meringue by modern standards and will weep if it stands. Beat the whites to soft peaks before adding the sugar, then to stiff, and serve within an hour or two if you want it looking rocky.
- Yield and costFour servings, as stated. The eightpence is a period price note, not a measure of anything you can buy now.
Recipes titled "of tinned apricots" tell you a good deal about the late-Victorian kitchen: canned fruit had gone from luxury to staple over the second half of the nineteenth century, with Californian and Australian apricots and peaches arriving in British grocers in quantity, and cookery writers began writing recipes built specifically around the tin rather than treating it as a poor substitute for fresh. The dish itself belongs to the large family of starch-thickened milk puddings crowned with jam or fruit and a meringue lid, of which queen of pudding is the best-known survivor; cornflour, sold in Britain from the mid-century by Brown & Polson among others, was heavily promoted as a cheap, reliable thickener for exactly this sort of nursery and family sweet. The inclusion of a probable cost, a standing feature of Cassell's, marks it as a book written for households keeping a close eye on the weekly books.