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Lamartine's Pudding
Stew four large apples in a little water, with a small piece of cinnamon, until they are tender, but unbroken. Take them up, drain them, and beat them with a fork. Let them get cold, then mix with them the yolks of four eggs and the white of one, well beaten, a little pounded sugar, two or three drops of vanilla, two ounces of fresh butter, and three-quarters of a pint of cream or good milk. Line a pie-dish with good puff paste. Pour in the mixture, and bake in a moderate oven. Strew sifted sugar over before serving. Apricots may be substituted for the apples in this recipe. Time to bake, half an hour. Probable cost, when made with milk, 1s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
An apple custard baked in a puff pastry case — closer to a French flan aux pommes than to a steamed English pudding. The instructions are sound, but two of the measurements and the vagueness about the oven need attention.
- The hinge: keep the oven gentleThis is a custard, and a custard set too fast will curdle and weep. Bake at 325-350F and pull it when the centre is just barely wobbly — around 170-175F on a thermometer. The stated half hour is plausible but treat it as a first check, not a finish line.
- "A moderate oven"The book gives no temperatures; moderate is conventionally read as somewhere around 350F. Given the egg content, the lower end of that range serves better here.
- Three-quarters of a pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so this is 15 fl oz — a scant 2 US cups. Whole milk works, as the recipe says and as the costing assumes, but single or light cream gives a richer set.
- Pounded and sifted sugarPounded sugar is sugar beaten fine in a mortar, roughly what we would call caster or superfine. The "sifted sugar" strewn over at the end is sugar passed through a sieve — icing sugar or a very fine caster.
- Blind bake the caseA wet custard poured into raw puff paste gives a pale, sodden base. Line the dish, chill it, and bake it blind at 400F until dry and set, then lower the oven before filling.
- Two or three drops of vanillaProbably a concentrated vanilla essence, likely stronger than a modern supermarket extract. Around half a teaspoon of good extract, or the seeds of half a pod, gets you to roughly the same place.
- Stewing the apples"Tender but unbroken" matters — quarter and core four large cooking apples (any firm tart variety that holds its shape), stew in a splash of water with a small piece of cinnamon bark, then drain well. Excess liquid will thin the custard and stop it setting.
- YieldFour or five servings, as the recipe states. Best eaten the day it is baked; the pastry softens overnight.
Victorian and Edwardian cookery books were full of dishes named for public figures, and this one very likely honours Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869), the French Romantic poet who was a leading figure in the provisional government of the Second Republic in 1848 and was well known in Britain. The naming tells you more about the fashion than about the food: attaching a statesman's or a singer's name to a custard or a cutlet was common in the period, and compilers reproduced such names along with the methods. The dish itself is straightforwardly French in construction — stewed fruit folded into a rich egg custard in a pastry case, with more yolks than whites for body and colour.