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Celestine Pudding
Line a well-buttered mould with buttered paper, ornament the bottom with preserved cherries and angelica to taste. Split nine sponge cakes, spread with apricot jam, and cut them into three portions. Fill the mould with alternate layers of cake, ratafias, and preserved cherries. Make a custard with six whole eggs, two yolks, a pint and a half of milk, and two ounces of castor sugar; add a grated nutmeg and zest of one lemon; strain into the mould. Place this in a stewpan with water round, cover, and slowly steam for forty-five minutes. For the sauce use half a pint of good jelly flavoured with kirsch, to which has been added a little apricot jam. Probable cost, 2s.
This is a steamed cabinet-pudding: sponge, jam and candied fruit set in a baked-custard base. The custard is the whole game — heat it too fast and the pudding weeps and honeycombs.
- Mould and liningUse a 2-quart (2-litre) charlotte mould, pudding basin or deep cake tin — the recipe gives no size, so this is an inference from the quantities. The original says to line the mould with buttered paper; butter the paper on both sides so the cherries and angelica release cleanly when turned out.
- Imperial measuresA pint and a half here is imperial: 30 fl oz, or roughly 3 1/2 US cups of milk. Six whole eggs plus two extra yolks to that much milk gives a soft, spoonable set rather than a firm slice.
- Sponge cakes and ratafiasNine sponge cakes means nine trifle sponges or two packets of ladyfingers. Ratafias were small crisp almond macaroons — amaretti, the hard Italian kind, are the closest thing on a shelf today. Castor sugar is superfine sugar; granulated dissolves fine in the custard.
- AngelicaCandied angelica stem, once standard for green decoration, is now a specialist item found in baking suppliers. Candied citron peel or thin strips of glacé pineapple stand in visually.
- Ease off the nutmegA whole grated nutmeg into three-plus cups of custard is overwhelming by modern palates. A quarter to a half nutmeg, freshly grated, reads as Victorian without swamping the lemon zest.
- Steaming, and the temperature that mattersSet the covered mould in a pan with hot water reaching halfway up, and keep the water at a bare shiver — never a rolling boil. Cook until the centre reaches 170-175F (77-80C); 45 minutes is optimistic for a full 2-quart mould, and 60-75 minutes is more realistic. A boiling water bath curdles the eggs and forces liquid out of the set.
- Turning outLet it stand 10 minutes off the heat, then run a knife round, invert onto a warm dish and peel the paper away. Turning out immediately risks collapse; leaving it to go cold makes it stick.
- The sauce"Good jelly" is unspecified here; a clear fruit jelly such as redcurrant or apple suits it, melted gently with a spoonful of apricot jam and the kirsch stirred in off the heat so the spirit is not driven off. Half an imperial pint is 10 fl oz, generous for the quantity.
- YieldServes six to eight. The 2s. cost suggests a dinner-party sweet rather than an everyday one.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of the steamed moulded pudding, when a household with a reliable range and a set of tinned moulds could turn out a shaped, glossy sweet for a dinner table without an oven to spare. The structure here sffff