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INDIAN PUDDING (another way) (Line a pie-dish with some good)
Line a pie-dish with some good puff paste, and put an edging of the same round the rim. Place a layer of sliced apples at the bottom, on the paste, add a salt-spoonful of grated nutmeg, and sugar to taste. Next whisk ten eggs, with half a pint of red wine, and at the same time place three French rolls, cut in slices, to soak in a pint of rich cream; add this with the eggs to the ingredients already in the dish, and bake the pudding from thirty to forty minutes. Probable cost, 3s. 6d. Sufficient for seven or eight persons.
A rich bread-and-egg custard baked over apples in a puff pastry case, from a period when a pudding for eight could absorb ten eggs and a pint of cream without comment. The original gives no oven temperature, and the quantities need scaling before you use them.
- The hinge: bake it gentlyThis is a custard, and the added red wine makes the eggs more prone to curdling, not less. Bake at 325F (160C) until the centre is just set with a slight wobble; at a higher heat the mixture will scramble and weep before the pastry has coloured. Thirty to forty minutes is plausible only at that lower temperature and in a shallow dish.
- Imperial pints and half-pintsCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so the cream is 2 1/2 US cups and the red wine 1 1/4 US cups. A salt-spoonful of nutmeg is about a quarter teaspoon, which is enough for this volume of dairy.
- Ten eggs is too manyEggs sold in Victorian kitchens generally ran smaller than a modern large egg, so seven or eight modern eggs will give roughly the same weight, and the soaked bread supplies plenty of body on its own.
- French rollsThese were small, soft, white enriched rolls, not the crusty baguette the name suggests now. Brioche, challah or a plain soft white roll behaves the same way in the cream; stale bread soaks better than fresh.
- The apples will not cook throughRaw slices buried under custard at 325F for forty minutes come out crunchy. Slice them thin and soften them in butter first, or the layer at the bottom will still be firm when the custard is set.
- Blind bake the pastryA wet custard poured onto raw puff paste produces a grey, sodden base. Bake the lined dish with weights until dry and lightly coloured, then add the filling. The strip of paste round the rim is decorative and should go on for the second bake.
- Wine and sugarThe recipe specifies only red wine; a dry one works here, since the sweetness comes from the added sugar. Around 1/2 cup of sugar suits this quantity, adjusted to how tart the apples are.
- YieldThe original figure of seven or eight is honest for a deep dish. Serve it warm rather than hot, when the custard has firmed enough to cut.
The name is the puzzle here. American Indian pudding is a cornmeal dish, boiled or baked with molasses, and this recipe contains no cornmeal at all; why the label attached to a rich, spiced, wine-laced pudding of this kind is not clear. What the recipe belongs to is the older English tradition of the bread custard baked in a pastry case, a form found in English cookery since the medieval and Tudor custard tarts. The stated cost of 3s 6d marks it as a dish for a household with money: that was a significant sum for a single pudding, and it reflects the wine and cream far more than the apples.