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Apricot Pudding
Pour a pint of new milk (boiling) over six table-spoonfuls of bread-crumbs. Let them stand until cold. Then add the well-beaten yolks of three eggs, two table-spoonfuls of sherry, a slight flavouring of the essence of almonds, and four ounces of sifted sugar. Beat them thoroughly, then add to them twelve apricots which have been pared, stoned, and simmered gently until they have been reduced to a pulp. Lastly, whisk the whites of two eggs to a firm froth, and add them to the rest. Place the whole in a pie-dish which has been lined with good puff paste, and bake in a quick oven. Time to bake, half an hour. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A bread-and-custard pudding carried by fruit rather than by flour, baked in a pastry-lined dish. The main thing to manage is the conflict between a pastry crust that wants fierce heat and an egg custard that does not.
- The hinge: heat in two stagesA "quick oven" is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F, which suits the puff paste but will scramble the filling if held there for the full half hour. Start hot, around 425F, for the first ten to twelve minutes to set and lift the pastry, then drop to 350F for the remainder and bake until the centre is just set with a slight wobble.
- New milkSimply fresh milk, not soured or skimmed; use whole milk. A pint here is the imperial pint, 20 fl oz (about 568 ml), so a little under 2 1/2 US cups.
- Bread-crumbsSix tablespoons of soft fresh crumbs from a day-old loaf; the weight depends entirely on how loosely they are heaped, so measure by spoon rather than by scale. Dried packaged crumbs absorb far more liquid and will make the pudding stodgy.
- Twelve apricotsFresh fruit, about 1 to 1 1/4 lb, giving roughly a cup of thick pulp once cooked down. Drained tinned apricot halves work if fresh are hard and flavourless, but reduce them in a pan first or the extra syrup will loosen the custard.
- Essence of almondsModern almond extract stands in directly, but it is potent and the recipe asks only for a "slight flavouring": a quarter teaspoon is about right; half a teaspoon will dominate the apricot.
- Sifted sugarCaster sugar, 4 oz, about half a cup. Sifting mattered when sugar came from a loaf and needed breaking down; with modern caster sugar you can skip it.
- The pastry basePuff paste under a wet filling goes grey and soft. Line the dish, chill it, and blind-bake the shell for ten minutes before the custard goes in.
- YieldFour or five servings, as stated. The recipe does not give a dish size; a pie-dish of moderate size is implied. The "probable cost, 2s. 6d." is a period price guide, not an instruction.
Apricots put this one squarely in high summer, when English wall-trained trees and imported French fruit both came good at once. The construction is older than the book: a pint of milk poured hot over breadcrumbs, enriched with yolks and lightened with whipped whites, is a common eighteenth- and nineteenth-century bread pudding, here turned into a fruit pudding by folding in a thick apricot purée and baked in a pastry-lined dish so it could be sent to table whole. The sherry and almond essence are conventional Victorian partners for apricot, the almond note reinforcing what is already in the kernel of the stone; earlier cooks sometimes got that flavour by cracking a few of the stones themselves.