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GALA PUDDING (sometimes called General Satisfaction Pudding)
Take three eggs, separate the whites from the yolks, beat the latter well, mix with them a cupful of boiling milk, flavoured with lemon and add a table-spoonful of sugar, a piece of butter the size of a walnut; pour this custard into a stewpan, simmer gently, stirring all the time, until it thickens. Line the edge of a piedish with a good crust. Three parts fill it with slices of spongecake, spread with apricot, strawberry, or any other jam. Pour the custard over them, and bake in a moderate oven. When the pudding is sufficiently cooked, lay on it the whites of three eggs, beaten to a firm froth, and sprinkle a dessert-spoonful of white sugar upon this. Put it into the oven a few minutes longer, then serve. Time, fifteen minutes to bake. Probable cost, 1s. 2d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian trifle-pudding: jam-spread sponge under a stirred custard, baked in a pastry-edged dish and finished with meringue. The custard is the hinge.
- Do not let the custard boilThree yolks with a cup of milk is a thin custard that will scramble the moment it reaches a simmer, despite the wording. Hold it around 170-175F, stirring, until it coats the spoon, then take it straight off the heat.
- "A cupful"Read it as 8 fl oz / 240 ml. Victorian cup measures were not standardised and a teacup was often reckoned smaller, so if the mixture looks scant against the sponge, err on the larger measure.
- Butter the size of a walnutSomewhere between 1/2 and 1 oz; period equivalences vary. A tablespoon is a safe reading here.
- Moderate oven350F / 175C. The recipe allows fifteen minutes to bake and 'a few minutes' more for the meringue; fifteen minutes will only just set the custard around the sponge, and a deep dish may need longer.
- Flavoured with lemonMost likely lemon peel steeped in the hot milk rather than juice; lemon essence would also fit the wording. Acid added to a yolk custard encourages curdling, so pare the zest in strips, infuse it in the milk, and lift it out before mixing.
- The crust is edging only"Line the edge of a piedish" means a band of shortcrust pressed round the rim, a Victorian habit that gave the pudding a browned border. There is no bottom crust, and none is wanted.
- MeringueThree whites beaten firm with only a dessertspoon (about 2 tsp) of sugar makes a soft, dry-eating French meringue that weeps easily. Beat in the sugar rather than sprinkling it on if you want it to hold.
- YieldFour to five, as stated, from a dish of about 1 to 1.5 pints. Serve warm; the sponge turns pasty once fully chilled.
The alternative name suggests a dish assembled from things already in the house — yesterday's sponge cake, a jar of jam, a few eggs — and dressed up with pastry and meringue so it could go to table as something. A costing of 1s. 2d. for four or five people puts it at the cheap end of a company sweet in late-Victorian Britain, and its construction is essentially a baked trifle: the same sponge-jam-custard order that trifle had settled into by the mid-nineteenth century, but set in the oven and capped like a queen of puddings rather than served cold under whipped cream. The meringue lid uses the whites left over from the custard yolks, and the same economy accounts for a good many puddings of the period ending this way.