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Curd Pudding
Turn a quart of milk with a little rennet; drain off the whey, and mix the curd with two ounces of butter beaten to a cream, three table-spoonfuls of finely-grated bread-crumbs, two table-spoonfuls of sifted sugar, a table-spoonful of new milk, a couple of fresh eggs, and a glass of white wine. Butter some plain round moulds, rather more than half fill them with the mixture, and bake them in a good oven for about twenty minutes. Turn them out, sift a little sugar over them, stick a few sliced and blanched almonds in them, and serve with curacoa sauce. Probable cost, 10d., exclusive of the wine. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A small baked cheesecake in individual moulds, made from fresh rennet curd rather than a bought cheese. The curd is the whole point, so start there.
- Making the curdA quart is roughly 4 cups of whole milk (not ultra-pasteurised, which will not set firmly). Warm it to about 100F, stir in liquid animal or vegetable rennet at the dose on the bottle, and leave undisturbed until it breaks cleanly. Cut and drain in muslin until the mass holds together but is still moist; the drained yield depends on how long you let it drip.
- A substitute if you skip the rennetWhole-milk ricotta or a well-drained fresh farmer's cheese gives close to the same texture. Drain it in a sieve for an hour first; a wet curd makes a sloppy batter that will not turn out.
- "A good oven"Best read as a moderately hot oven, somewhere in the region of 375F, rather than any fixed figure. Twenty minutes suits small moulds; the puddings should be set at the centre and just coloured. Larger moulds will need longer and are better at a slightly lower heat.
- Moulds and the turning outDariole moulds, large ramekins or a deep muffin tin all work. Butter them generously and fill a little over half, as the eggs lift the mixture. Let them stand five minutes out of the oven before inverting or they tear.
- "A glass of white wine"A Victorian wine glass is usually reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, though the measure was never standardised. A sweet or off-dry white probably sits closer to the period taste than a bone-dry modern wine.
- Sifted sugarSugar pounded and sifted fine; caster sugar is the nearest modern equivalent. Two tablespoonfuls makes only a mildly sweet pudding, and more sugar is sifted over at the end.
- Curaçoa sauceA curaçao sauce of this period is generally a sweetened syrup or a thin custard flavoured with the orange liqueur. A simple orange sauce, or plain cream, serves the same purpose.
- YieldFour to five, as stated, which comes to five or six dariole moulds. Best eaten warm; the curd stiffens noticeably once cold.
Curd puddings belong to a long English line of baked cheesecakes, the ancestors of which appear in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century receipt books as "cheesecakes" made from the curd of that morning's milk, enriched with butter, eggs, sack or white wine, and sometimes almonds. In a dairying household the curd was simply what you had once you had set milk with rennet, so the pudding cost little beyond the wine. By the time this dictionary was compiled in the late nineteenth century, rennet was sold in bottles by the chemist and grocer for junkets and puddings, so a town cook could still make curd without keeping a cow. The cura aons sauce and blanched almonds are the period's standard finish for a small moulded sweet.