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Junior United Pudding
Make a custard with half a pint of milk and the yolks of four eggs. Take three-quarters of a pound of stale spongecake, cut it into small pieces, and spread butter on one side and marmalade on the other. Grease a mould, and put the pieces of cake in, placing the buttered side next the mould; fill the mould nearly full, and pour in the custard. Bake for half an hour, and turn out when cold.
A cabinet-pudding variant built from buttered, marmalade-spread sponge set in a rich yolk custard. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how such puddings are baked, so a few gaps need filling.
- The custardHalf a British pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups. Four yolks to that quantity of milk gives a very rich, firm set — warm the milk, whisk it into the yolks, and sweeten to taste, since the original relies on the marmalade for sugar.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A pudding of this kind wants a moderate oven, 325–350°F, and it is worth standing the mould in a roasting tin of hot water so the custard sets smoothly rather than curdling at the edges.
- Half an hour is a minimumThirty minutes suits a shallow mould. A deeper one, or a full pint of custard, will need 45 minutes to an hour. It is done when the centre is just set and barely trembles.
- Butter against the mouldThe recipe is explicit: the buttered faces go next the mould, which leaves the marmalade faces turned inward. No reason is given, but butter against the metal would plausibly help the pudding release and keeps the preserve inside the pudding rather than against the tin. The recipe separately tells you to grease the mould as well.
- Stale spongeFresh sponge collapses into paste when the custard soaks in. Day-old or two-day-old cake, cut into pieces roughly an inch across, holds its shape. Trifle sponges or a plain Madeira-style loaf both work.
- Letting it standGive the assembled pudding 20 to 30 minutes before it goes in the oven so the cake absorbs the custard evenly. Otherwise the top pieces stay dry and the base turns to sludge.
- Turning out coldThe instruction is deliberate — a warm yolk custard has not firmed enough to hold. Cool completely, ideally chilled, then loosen the edge with a knife before inverting.
- YieldThe recipe gives no mould size, only that it should be filled nearly full before the custard goes in. Three-quarters of a pound of cake with half a pint of custard makes a substantial pudding, enough for a family table.
Cassell's gives this as one of a large family of moulded sponge-and-custard puddings that Victorian and Edwardian kitchens turned out in dozens of near-identical variations — cabinet pudding, Chancellor's pudding, Newcastle pudding, and the rest — differing chiefly in whether the cake was layered with dried fruit, jam, marmalade or ratafias. The point of them all was economy dressed as elegance: stale sponge, which no household wanted to waste, was reassembled with eggs and milk into something that came out of the mould looking like a set piece. Fanciful names of this sort were routinely attached to such puddings in nineteenth-century cookery books, often after a club, a school, a regiment or a public occasion, and the origin of most of them, this one included, is not documented. The marmalade is the English touch: bitter orange preserve was by then widely kept in the pantry, and its sharpness is what keeps four egg yolks and three-quarters of a pound of buttered cake from tasting merely heavy.