Home › The Principles of Cookery › Malvern Pudding
Malvern Pudding
Put two dessert-spoonfuls of Indian corn-flour into a basin, and mix with a little cold milk, say about two table-spoonfuls. Boil together four ounces of good loaf sugar and half a pint of new milk. Stir it into the basin while boiling hot, adding, when the heat has gone off a litle, three well-beaten eggs, with three table-spoonfuls of good cream, which should be thick, and a little nutmeg. If cream be not at hand, use more eggs. Pour some of this custard into a buttered dish, and have ready boiled some well-flavoured apples, sweetened with half their weight of good loaf sugar, and made pleasant to the taste with the grated rind and juice of a lemon. Put a layer of this on the custard, and fill up alternately with apples and custard. Bake in a brisk oven. Time, twenty to twenty-five minutes. The apple and custard will be very good served cold.
A layered baked custard with sweetened apple, of the sort Victorian cookbooks turned out by the dozen. The critical point is heat control: this is a custard, and the oven direction in the original will curdle it if taken literally.
- Indian corn-flourThis is maize starch, what Americans call cornstarch and the British call cornflour. It is not cornmeal, and the pudding will be gritty if you use cornmeal.
- Dessert-spoonfulsA dessertspoon is about 2 teaspoons, so two of them come to roughly 4 teaspoons of cornstarch. That is a light thickening, meant to stabilise the custard rather than set it stiff.
- Loaf sugar and new milkLoaf sugar was refined white sugar broken from a cone; ordinary granulated sugar is the direct replacement, 4 oz being about 115 g, a generous half cup. "New milk" means fresh unskimmed milk, so use whole milk.
- Half a pintIn an imperial pint of 20 fl oz, half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ cups. American readers working from a 16 oz pint will get a thicker, eggier custard.
- A brisk ovenA brisk oven is generally reckoned somewhere in the region of 400-425F, which is hot for a set custard and risks curdling it into sweet scrambled egg. Bake at 325-350F and judge by a faint wobble at the centre rather than by the twenty to twenty-five minutes given, which presumably assumes the hotter oven.
- Tempering the eggsThe instruction to let the heat go off before adding the beaten eggs is the hinge of the recipe. Pour the boiling sweetened milk onto the slaked cornflour, stir, wait until it is merely hot to the finger, then beat the eggs in.
- The apples"Well-flavoured apples" means a cooker that breaks down, such as Bramley; sweeter eating apples with half their weight in sugar will be cloying. Cook them down to a thick purée and let the steam off, or the water they release will thin the custard layers.
- Cream, or more eggsThe "thick" cream intended is closer to double or heavy cream than to pouring cream. If you follow the alternative and add an extra egg or two instead, expect a firmer, plainer set.
- YieldEnough for a 1-quart dish, serving four to six. As the original notes, it eats well cold, and the layers show more clearly once chilled.
Late-Victorian household dictionaries often filed puddings under place names, and Malvern in Worcestershire supplies both a spa-town cachet and apple-growing country — a pudding of apple and custard needed no further justification for the title. The recipe also leans on a newer ingredient: maize starch was manufactured in Britain from around the mid-nineteenth century and sold under the name cornflour, and cookery writers of the period sometimes still distinguished it as "Indian" corn-flour, apparently to keep it apart from wheaten flour and from the arrowroot and sago it was displacing. Its use here is technical rather than decorative — a spoonful or two of starch helps keep an egg custard from separating in the oven. The direction to substitute extra eggs when cream is not to hand suggests cream was not always to be had, skimmed off the day's milk if there was any to spare.