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Canterbury Puddings
Melt two ounces of butter, then stir into it gradually two well-beaten eggs. Add two ounces of sugar, two ounces of flour, and a little lemon-rind. At the last moment stir in a pinch of baking powder. Half fill buttered cups with the batter, and bake in a well-heated oven. Serve on a dish with wine sauce poured round. Time to bake, about twenty minutes.
A plain Victorian cup pudding: equal weights of butter, sugar and flour bound with eggs, baked rather than steamed. The whole thing rests on the eggs being incorporated into butter that is warm but not hot.
- Temper the butterMelt the butter and let it cool to barely warm before trickling in the beaten eggs. Poured into hot butter the eggs curdle, and the batter will bake heavy and streaked.
- Weights, not cupsTwo ounces each of butter, sugar and flour is 55-60 g each; in volume, roughly 4 tablespoons butter, 4 tablespoons sugar and a scant half cup of flour. The two eggs make this a fairly loose batter, which is correct.
- "A well-heated oven"Read this as 375-400F (190-200C). Twenty minutes at that heat gives small puddings that are risen, golden and just firm at the centre.
- The cupsDariole moulds are one period vessel for small baked puddings; buttered ramekins, ovenproof teacups or a deep muffin tin all work. Half full leaves room for the rise.
- Baking powder lastThe instruction is not fussiness. Victorian baking powders began working on contact with the wet batter, and the puddings go into the oven immediately. Modern double-acting powder is more forgiving, but the habit still gives the best lift.
- Lemon rind"A little" means the finely grated zest of about half a lemon. Rub it into the sugar first to draw out the oil; the flavour carries much further that way.
- Wine sauceA typical period wine sauce is a sweetened sherry or Madeira sauce thickened lightly with cornflour or arrowroot, or a custard enriched with wine, served warm and poured around rather than over.
- YieldEnough for six small cups, or four generous ones. Turn them out while hot; left to cool in the mould they stick.
Cassell's carries a number of puddings named for English towns and counties, and the names rarely record much more than a house style or an editor's preference for variety. This one is baked in cups rather than boiled in a cloth or steamed in a basin, part of a shift running through nineteenth-century pudding cookery as closed ranges and more reliable ovens spread through middle-class kitchens. The formula is the pound-cake principle scaled down and loosened with extra egg, with chemical raising added on top of the eggs, which places it after baking powder had become a domestic staple in the second half of the century. The wine sauce is the older element: sweet fortified wine sauces poured round a small baked or boiled pudding were common dinner practice well before this book.