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Cup Pudding
Mix a small tea-spoonful of flour and a tiny pinch of salt very smoothly with a dessertspoonful of cold water; pour over it, stirring all the time, a tea-cupful of boiling milk, and when it is cold strain it, to ensure its being perfectly free from lumps, and add one fresh egg well beaten. Sweeten with a small tea-spoonful of sugar, pour it into a buttered basin, and bake for twenty minutes. Turn out to serve. If it be allowed, a little sherry is an improvement. (A wholesome, easily-digested pudding for an invalid.) Probable cost, 3d. Sufficient for one person.
This is a single-serving baked custard thickened with a spoonful of flour to make it more forgiving. The book gives no oven temperature, and that is the one thing worth settling before you start.
- Oven heatBake at around 325F, no hotter. Egg custards baked much above 350F tend to curdle and weep; twenty minutes at 325F in a small basin is about right, and it is done when the centre wobbles as a single mass.
- A water bath is impliedA water bath -- The recipe does not mention one, but standing the basin in a tin of hot water, half way up the sides, is a sensible precaution; baked dry, the outside may set firm before the middle sets at all.
- The basinA pudding basin here means a small ovenproof bowl of about 1 cup capacity or a little more, since the mixture comes to some 7-8 fl oz. Butter it well, since the pudding is meant to be turned out whole.
- MeasuresA teacupful is roughly 5-6 fl oz, so use 2/3 cup milk. A dessertspoonful is about 2 teaspoons. The "small tea-spoonful" of flour and of sugar are level teaspoons — this is a barely sweet pudding by modern taste, and a full teaspoon or two of sugar will not harm the set.
- Why the flour is scalded firstMaking a smooth paste with cold water before adding boiling milk is the standard method for a lump-free thickening. Cooling and straining afterwards is not fussiness: adding egg to hot milk scrambles it, so the mixture must be cold or barely warm before the beaten egg goes in.
- Turning outLet it stand five minutes off the heat, run a thin knife round the edge, then invert onto a warmed plate. Straight from the oven it will collapse.
- Yield and servingOne portion, as stated. Serve warm rather than hot; a little grated nutmeg or a spoonful of fruit puree suits it if the sherry is not wanted.
"If it be allowed" is the giveaway phrase: this is invalid cookery, a whole department of Victorian and Edwardian household books written for feeding the sick, where the doctor rather than the cook decided what went on the tray. Wine, spice and richness were all matters of permission. A plain egg custard was the mainstay of that diet — nourishing, bland, and swallowed without effort — and the teaspoon of flour here gives the mixture enough body to survive an inattentive oven and to turn out cleanly for an appetite that needed coaxing by appearances. The quoted cost of 3d for a single serving is typical of the habit of pricing every dish.