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Indian Pudding
Beat up five eggs with a quarter of a pound of butter and a crumbled penny spongecake. Boil, but first grate, a cocoa-nut (putting aside all the brown part) in a pint of milk. In ten minutes set the milk to cool, and when sufficiently cooled stir it into the eggs, then put all into a dish previously lined with puff paste, and bake from a half to three-quarters of an hour in a moderate oven. Probable cost, about 1s. 6d. Sufficient for seven or eight persons.
A coconut custard baked in a pastry case — not the New England cornmeal pudding of the same name. The instructions are terse in the Victorian manner, so a few things need pinning down.
- The hinge: cool the milk before it meets the eggsThe coconut milk comes off the heat scalding hot and will scramble five beaten eggs on contact. Let it drop to hand-warm, then pour it into the eggs in a slow stream while whisking. This is the one step that decides whether you get a custard or curds.
- A moderate ovenConventionally taken as around 350F/175C. At the lower end of the stated range the custard will be set at the edges and barely trembling in the centre; a deeper dish will want the longer time. Pull it while the middle still moves.
- Penny spongecakeA small individual sponge sold for a penny; its exact size is not recorded, but around 2 oz / 55 g of crumb is a reasonable working figure. Any plain sponge or a couple of trifle sponges will do; it acts as a thickener.
- A pint of milkCassell's is a British book, so this is an Imperial pint — 20 fl oz / 570 ml, not the American 16.
- Grating the cocoa-nutA whole fresh coconut yields roughly 10 to 14 oz / 300 to 400 g of grated white flesh. "Putting aside all the brown part" most likely means the papery brown inner skin, which is bitter and shows as dark flecks. Unsweetened desiccated coconut, steeped in the hot milk, works in its place.
- The butterA quarter pound (115 g) with five eggs is generous by modern taste and will separate out as an oily film if the oven runs hot. Soften rather than melt it and beat it into the eggs before the milk goes in.
- Puff paste liningBlind-bake the shell at 400F/200C for 15 minutes with weights, then let it cool a little before filling. Wet custard poured into raw puff pastry gives a sodden base.
- YieldThe original's seven or eight portions suit a 9-inch deep dish or tart tin. Serve just warm or at room temperature; it slices badly straight from the oven.
The name is a reminder that "Indian" on a Victorian British bill of fare could point vaguely at the tropics and, in a pudding, often at coconut, which reached London as whole nuts by sea. The same title in an American book of the same decade means something entirely different: a slow-baked cornmeal and molasses pudding, so called because cornmeal was long known as Indian meal. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, assembled in the 1870s as an alphabetical household reference rather than a chef's manual, carries dozens of these short custard-and-pastry formulas with a costing attached — the "probable cost, about 1s. 6d." places the dish squarely in the middle-class dinner rather than the grand table.