Home › The Principles of Cookery › Ladywell Pudding
Ladywell Pudding
Mix a table-spoonful of flour and a little grated nutmeg to a smooth paste with cold milk, and add a little sugar to make the pudding palatable. Pour on half a pint of boiling milk, and stir well. When cold, add a beaten egg, and half a wineglass of sherry or Madeira. Pour into a buttered pie-dish, and bake half an hour.
A small baked flour custard of the nursery-and-invalid school, thickened with a spoonful of flour so it will not curdle. The original gives no oven temperature and no yield; both are supplied below.
- The hinge: let the flour mixture coolThe egg goes in only after the scalded milk has cooled, exactly as written. Add it to hot milk and it scrambles into threads that no amount of baking will smooth out.
- Half a pintCassell's is a British book, so this is an imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz or about 1¼ US cups. Scaling to a US half-pint of 8 oz gives a noticeably stiffer pudding.
- Half a wineglassA Victorian wineglass is reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so half is roughly 1 fl oz — two tablespoons of sherry or Madeira. Use a dry to medium sherry; cream sherry pushes it sweet.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 350F/175C, for the stated half hour will set a dish this shallow. Standing the pie-dish in a roasting tin of hot water guards against the edges bubbling and weeping before the centre sets.
- Sugar"A little sugar to make the pudding palatable" is left to the cook's judgement; a tablespoon is a reasonable reading. This was written as a light, barely sweet dish; 2 tablespoons brings it closer to modern expectations.
- Grated nutmegGrate it fresh from the whole seed. Pre-ground nutmeg has lost most of its volatiles and, in a pudding this plain, it is the only real flavour besides the wine.
- Doneness and yieldThe custard is set when the centre trembles as one piece and a knife inserted off-centre comes out clean; it firms further as it cools. This makes two modest servings, or one small supper.
Cassell's ran to hundreds of these small baked and boiled puddings, many carrying the name of a house, a street or a parish for no reason the book bothers to record — Ladywell is a district of Lewisham in south-east London, named after a well that gave the area its identity long before the railway reached it in the 1850s, though whether the pudding has any genuine connection to the place or simply borrowed a pleasant-sounding name is not documented. What the recipe does show clearly is its type: a flour-stabilised custard, cheap in eggs, small in quantity, mildly spiced and fortified with a spoonful of sherry. Puddings built this way belonged to the sickroom and the nursery as much as the dinner table, the flour serving to keep a single egg from curdling and the fortified wine standing in as both flavouring and, by the thinking of the day, a restorative.