Home › The Principles of Cookery › Ginger Puffs
Ginger Puffs
Mix two eggs thoroughly, and beat them smoothly with four ounces of fine flour. Add a pinch of salt, a quarter of a small nutmeg grated, half a tea-spoonful of freshly-ground ginger, a dessert-spoonful of sifted loaf sugar, three table-spoonfuls of sherry, and a tea-spoonful of lemon-juice. Half fill some well-buttered cups with the mixture, and bake in a brisk oven. Turn out before serving, and send wine sauce to table with them. Time, twenty minutes to bake. Probable cost, 4d., exclusive of the wine. Sufficient for three or four puffs.
A batter pudding in miniature: no raising agent at all, so the entire lift comes from steam and egg. Everything below follows from that.
- Do not open the ovenWith no chemical leavening, these rise like popovers and collapse if chilled mid-bake. Give them the full twenty minutes before looking, and serve them the moment they are turned out.
- "Brisk oven"A hot oven, roughly 400-425F/200-220C. A slower oven will set the outside before the steam builds and you get a dense little pancake in a cup.
- Weights and spoonsFour ounces of flour is 115 g, roughly a scant cup. A dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons; Victorian spoon measures were not standardised, so read three table-spoonfuls of sherry as about 3 tablespoons.
- Loaf sugarSugar was sold in hard cones and broken up at home; "sifted loaf sugar" is simply crushed and sieved refined sugar. Caster sugar is the direct equivalent.
- Nutmeg and gingerA quarter of a small nutmeg is roughly 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon grated. The instruction to grind the ginger freshly matters more than it sounds -- ground ginger that has sat in a cupboard for a year contributes heat but no aroma.
- The cupsTeacups or dariole moulds, buttered heavily and filled no more than halfway. Ovenproof ramekins or a deep muffin tin work; a shallow bun tin does not give enough wall to climb.
- Wine sauceThe period sauce is sugar, butter and sherry or madeira thickened lightly, sometimes with an egg yolk, served warm. Without it these are quite plain, since the batter itself carries only a dessert-spoonful of sugar.
- YieldThree or four puffs, as stated -- a dessert for two, or a small course for four. The recipe doubles without trouble.
"Puff" in nineteenth-century English cookery covered a wide range of light things, from puff-paste turnovers to these eggy batters baked in cups, and the family they belong to is the batter pudding: the same flour-and-egg logic as Yorkshire pudding, sweetened and spiced. Sherry and grated nutmeg were often paired in English sweet batters and sauces well into the Victorian period, and the recipe calls for an accompanying "wine sauce" without explaining how to make one. The costing -- fourpence, exclusive of the wine -- is characteristic of Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, which priced nearly every dish for households running to a budget.