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Italian Pudding
Soak three sliced French rolls in a pint of cream which has been boiled and sweetened with loaf sugar. Beat up eight eggs, and add them to the soaked rolls when cool. Line a well-buttered dish with puff paste, the bottom of which fill with sliced apples, leaving enough of the dish empty to hold the cream. Strew sugar and some sliced candied peel on the top of the apples, add a glass of red wine, and, lastly, the cream. Edge the dish with some of the puff paste, and bake in a rather quick oven. Time, about half an hour. Probable cost, 3s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A Victorian bread-and-custard pudding baked in a pastry case, with apples beneath and candied peel and wine through the middle. Most of the work is in reconciling a hot oven with a custard that does not want one.
- The hinge: oven heatA "rather quick oven" is usually reckoned at around 400-425F, which risks curdling an egg custard into something grainy and weeping. Bake at 350F instead and expect closer to 45-55 minutes; the custard is done when it is set at the edges and still trembles at the centre.
- French rollsSoft white yeast rolls with a thin crust, not a baguette. Three of them is roughly 8-10 oz of bread; slightly stale rolls soak up the cream better than fresh.
- A pint of creamAn imperial pint, 20 fl oz or 2.5 US cups. Single cream or half-and-half suits this better than double, which with eight eggs gives a very heavy set.
- Eight eggsVictorian eggs were generally smaller and far less standardised than modern large ones. Roughly six large eggs to the pint of cream gives a custard of about the same richness; eight will set firm and sliceable, which may be what was wanted.
- Loaf sugarRefined white sugar broken from a cone. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute; about 3 oz sweetens the cream adequately.
- A glass of red wineIn cookery books of this period a wine glass is 2 to 2.5 fl oz. A dry red is fine; the pudding is already sweet.
- The pastryPuff paste under a wet filling goes to paste unless it is baked first. Line the dish, chill it, and blind-bake at 400F until the base is dry and coloured before the fruit goes in.
- The applesRaw slices will not soften in the time a custard takes to set. Cook them down first with a little of the sugar until just tender, then cool them before the cream goes over.
- Yield and costFive or six portions, as stated. The 3s. is the 19th-century retail cost of the ingredients and is of historical interest only.
Names like "Italian" attached to English puddings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries do not necessarily indicate an Italian origin; they appear to have signalled refinement, in the way that "French rolls" and "Spanish cream" did, and often mark a dish enriched with cream, wine and candied citron rather than plain milk and suet. Underneath the label this belongs to the large family of English bread-and-butter and cabinet puddings, which are usually traced back to the older habit of soaking stale bread in a sweetened, spiced custard so that nothing was wasted. The format -- a costing in shillings, a stated number of persons, and an oven described only by temperament, because the reader was assumed to know her own range -- is characteristic of the later Victorian household cookery dictionaries compiled for middle-class households with a cook. The candied peel and the glass of red wine suggest a company dish rather than a family one.