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Bakewell Pudding, Rich
Line a tart-dish with puff-paste, lay on it any kind of preserved fruit; get ready a quarter of a pound of melted butter, six ounces of finely-sifted sugar, and one ounce of almonds; add these ingredients to six yolks and two whites of eggs which have been thoroughly well beaten. Mix all together and fill up the dish. Bake carefully for one hour in a moderate oven. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A short Victorian recipe that assumes you know what an egg-and-butter filling should look like before it goes in the oven. The proportions are sound; the oven instruction is the only vague part.
- Weights in metric and cupsA quarter-pound of butter is 115 g (one US stick); six ounces of sugar is about 170 g, roughly three-quarters of a cup of caster sugar; one ounce of almonds is 30 g, a scant third of a cup ground.
- "Melted butter"Here it means literally butter melted and cooled, not the flour-thickened butter sauce that the same phrase denotes elsewhere in Victorian books. Let it cool to barely warm before it meets the eggs, or the yolks will scramble.
- The almondsSweet almonds, blanched and pounded fine — ground almonds from a packet are the direct equivalent. Do not substitute almond extract for the whole ounce; the nuts contribute body as well as flavour.
- A moderate oven350F / 175C. Given a full hour on a butter-and-yolk filling, the lower end is safer: start at 350F and drop to 325F / 160C once the surface is set, so the filling stays custardy rather than souffléing and cracking.
- "Bake carefully"This is the hinge. The filling is essentially a rich custard held together by yolks, and it must set gently — it is done when the centre is just faintly wobbly and a knife comes out clean, not when it puffs. Overbaking gives a dense, weeping, oily layer.
- Six yolks, two whitesNot an error. The extra yolks make the filling rich and yellow; the two whites give it just enough lift to rise slightly above the jam. Beat until pale and thick before adding anything else.
- The pastryPuff paste in a shallow tart dish will go soggy under a wet filling if it has no head start. Chill the lined dish well, and blind-bake it 10-12 minutes at 400F / 200C before the jam goes in.
- Preserved fruit"Any kind" in practice means a firm jam — raspberry, strawberry or apricot. Spread a thin layer, about 4-5 tablespoons; a thick one will boil up through the filling.
- YieldFour or five as written, in a dish of about 8-9 inches. Best eaten warm rather than hot, and it is better on the day it is made.
Bakewell, in Derbyshire, gave its name to two related things that are still confused: the pudding, an open pastry case spread with jam and filled with an egg-and-butter mixture, as here, and the later tart, in which the filling becomes an almond sponge and often wears a lid of icing. The pudding is the older form, and printed English recipes for it circulate from the middle of the nineteenth century — Eliza Acton gives one in Modern Cookery (1845). The much-repeated tale that it was invented by accident when a cook at a Bakewell inn poured egg mixture over jam instead of stirring it into pastry is traditional rather than documented. This version is headed 'rich', and a probable cost of 1s. 6d. is given for four or five persons.