Home › The Principles of Cookery › Batley Pudding
Batley Pudding
Mix three ounces of finely-powdered sugar with the yolks of three eggs and the white of one, well beaten. Blanch and pound fifteen almonds, and add them to the eggs with a table-spoonful of brandy. Boil two ounces of ground rice with half a pint of cream; let it stand to cool, then stir in two ounces of clarified butter, and mix all together. Bake in a moderate oven for thirty minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A baked almond and ground-rice custard, closer to an eighteenth-century almond pudding than to a nursery rice pudding. The whole thing hinges on the rice being fully cooked and cooled before the eggs go in.
- Moderate oven350F (175C). Thirty minutes is right for a shallow dish of about a pint and a half; a deeper dish will need longer, and the pudding is done when the centre is just set and no longer liquid under a gentle shake.
- Ground riceMilled rice, traditionally a coarser grind than the fine rice flour sold today and closer to cream of rice; either will serve here. It thickens the cream to a smooth paste in a few minutes of simmering, and must be stirred or it catches.
- Half a pint of creamThis is an imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz, so about 1 1/4 US cups. Single cream or a light whipping cream both work; the fat helps the pudding set without weeping.
- AlmondsFifteen blanched sweet almonds, ground fine, is roughly 2 tablespoons of almond flour by volume. Pounding in a mortar releases oil and gives a richer result than dry-grinding in a machine, but a food processor with a spoonful of the sugar will do.
- Clarified butterTwo ounces of butter with the milk solids and water removed. Melt 2 1/2 oz butter, skim, and pour off the clear fat, leaving the sediment behind. It should be warm but not hot when it meets the eggs.
- Egg proportionThree yolks and a single white gives a soft, rich set rather than a firm one. Do not be tempted to use all three whites, which would make it spongy and prone to rising then collapsing.
- Dish and water bathButter a shallow pie dish or six ramekins. In a modern fan-assisted oven a roasting tin of hot water round the dish prevents the edges setting hard before the middle.
- YieldFive or six as written, but these are Victorian portions served at the end of a long meal. Four is more realistic as a modern dessert. Serve just warm rather than hot, with stewed fruit or a spoonful of jam.
Cassell's arranged its puddings alphabetically by name, which preserved a great many local and family attributions whose origins were already obscure by the 1870s: Batley sits among dozens of similarly christened entries with no explanation offered. The name is usually taken to point at Batley in the West Riding of Yorkshire, a woollen town then at its industrial peak, though the connection is traditional rather than documented and the pudding itself is not especially Yorkshire in character. What it really is, is a late survivor of the rich baked almond pudding of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which pounded almonds, cream, eggs, brandy and sugar were bound with a little starch and baked, often inside a border of puff paste.