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Cowslip Pudding
Take two quarts of cowslip pips, pound them small, with half a pound of sweet biscuits, grated, and three pints of cream. Boil these together; then beat up ten eggs with a little cream and rose-water; sweeten to taste. Mix all well together; butter a dish, pour in the mixture, sprinkle a little fine sugar over all, and put into the oven. Probable cost, 2s. 6d.
A baked cream custard flavoured with cowslip flowers, in the tradition of flower puddings that ran from the seventeenth century into the Victorian kitchen. The quantities are for a large household and the flower is the hard part.
- "Pips" are the flowersCowslip pips are the yellow corollas pulled free of the green calyx, which is bitter and would spoil the custard. Two quarts of loose pips is a very large gathering — on the order of several thousand flowers.
- Sourcing the cowslipsCowslip (Primula veris) is not poisonous, but wild populations in Britain have declined sharply and uprooting any wild plant without the landowner's permission is illegal. Garden-grown or cultivated plants are the sensible source; if you cannot get flowers in quantity, this is a recipe to read rather than cook.
- Scale it downThree pints of cream and ten eggs will fill a very large dish and serve twelve or more. A quarter of the recipe — about 425ml cream, 2 to 3 eggs, a generous handful of pips — behaves the same way in a small baking dish.
- "Sweet biscuits, grated"The book most likely means dry, plain sponge-type biscuits of the Naples or ratafia sort, used as a thickener. Sponge fingers or trifle sponges, dried out and crushed fine, are the nearest thing; modern sweet biscuits made with a lot of fat will make the pudding greasy.
- Boiling the creamBring the cream, crushed biscuit and pips just to the boil to infuse, then let it cool to lukewarm before the eggs go in. Beaten eggs added to boiling cream are likely to scramble.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because none could be. Treat it as a baked custard: a moderate oven, 325F/160C, with the dish set in a roasting tin of hot water, for roughly 45 minutes to an hour until the centre is only just set. Much above 350F the custard is liable to weep and split.
- Rose-waterRose-water strengths vary a good deal between products. Start with a teaspoon in a scaled-down pudding and taste before adding more.
- The cost note"Probable cost, 2s. 6d." is the per-dish figure Cassell's supplied as a matter of course; the cream and eggs would account for most of it.
Flower cookery was a serious branch of the English kitchen long before it was a garnish: violets, marigolds, primroses and above all cowslips were candied, made into wine, and folded into creams and puddings. Cowslip pudding appears in English recipe collections from at least the eighteenth century and is essentially a spring dish, made in the few weeks when the meadows were yellow. Its survival into a late-Victorian reference work like Cassell's may say more about the compilers' habit of preserving older receipts than about what was commonly being served by then; cowslip meadows were already retreating under the plough. The construction, cream and eggs thickened with grated biscuit and scented with rose-water, is the standard baked-custard formula of the period; the flowers are the only thing that makes it unusual, and the reason it now reads as a period piece.