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Empress Pudding
Take equal quantities of powdered sugar and butter, about six ounces of each. Beat the butter until it is of a creamy consistency, mix four well-beaten yolks of eggs with it; add the sugar, and when the whole is well mixed, throw in by degrees six ounces of flour, and beat all thoroughly together. Bake in a brisk oven in small cups; only half fill them, as the batter will rise to the top in baking. Serve with cinnamon sauce. Time, twenty minutes to bake. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for seven or eight persons.
This is a yolk-only pound cake batter baked in cups rather than a steamed or boiled pudding. The proportions are the giveaway: equal weights of butter, sugar and flour, with no liquid and no leavening at all.
- The hinge: creaming and emulsionWith no baking powder, the only lift comes from air beaten into the butter and the yolks. Cream the butter and sugar until visibly pale and light, add the yolks a little at a time so the mixture does not split, and fold the flour in gently at the end rather than beating it hard.
- "A brisk oven"Victorian usage is inconsistent, but 'brisk' generally means a hot oven, somewhere around 400-425F. For small egg-rich cups that risks scorching the outsides before the centres set; 375-400F for about 20 minutes suits a modern oven, testing with a skewer.
- Small cupsDariole moulds, ramekins or a deep muffin tin, buttered and floured. Half-filling is not optional advice: the batter climbs as the trapped air expands.
- WeightsSix ounces each of butter, sugar and flour is about 170 g each, roughly 3/4 cup butter, a scant cup of sugar and about 1 1/3 to 1 1/2 cups flour. Weighing gives a truer result than cups here, since the whole recipe rests on the three being equal.
- Powdered sugarIn this book that means finely ground granulated sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornflour. Caster sugar is the right substitute.
- The leftover whitesFour whites are left over. They keep several days covered in the refrigerator, or freeze; meringue or an omelette absorbs them.
- Cinnamon sauceNo recipe is given here. A thin custard or a simple sugar-and-water syrup infused with a cinnamon stick and finished with butter both work; the pudding is rich and dry enough to need the moisture.
- Yield and costSufficient for seven or eight persons; the recipe does not say how many cups that makes. Best eaten warm the day they are baked. The "1s." is a shilling in pre-decimal money; Cassell's prints a probable cost for its dishes.
Victorian and Edwardian cookbooks are thick with dishes named for royalty and nobility, and puddings à l'impératrice or "Empress" puddings turn up in several late nineteenth-century English books with no consistent recipe behind the name; the label appears to have signalled richness and elegance rather than any fixed formula. What is under the name here is an old English technique: the pound-cake principle of equal weights of butter, sugar and flour, made richer by using yolks alone and baked in individual moulds so it could be turned out and sauced at table. Baking a "pudding" in cups rather than boiling it in a cloth became more common as closed ranges with ovens spread through middle-class kitchens, and Cassell's, issued in parts, prints the probable cost and the number served for its dishes.