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Marchioness Pudding
Beat the whites of six eggs to a stiff froth, and eight ounces of fresh butter to a cream. Add to the creamed butter eight ounces of finely-powdered loaf sugar and the same weight of grated cocoa-nut. Stir in the eggs, and fill a well-buttered tin mould. Bake in a quick oven. This pudding is to be eaten hot or cold. Or, line the mould with a rich paste, made as follows. Rub into four ounces of fresh butter, turned to cream, a quarter of a pound of fine flour. Mix an ounce of powdered sugar and the same weight of rice-flour, add them to the butter and flour, and moisten to a paste with two well-beaten eggs. Work all together well, line the tin mould, put the mixture in, and bake. Time, without paste, twenty minutes; with paste, one hour or more. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian coconut pudding that behaves more like a dense macaroon cake than a steamed pudding. It contains no flour and no raising agent in its plain form, so the beaten whites are the only structure it has.
- Fold, do not stirThe instruction to "stir in the eggs" will knock the air out of the whites and leave you with a greasy slab. Fold the stiff whites into the butter-sugar-coconut mixture in two or three additions, keeping as much volume as possible.
- Quick ovenA quick oven is usually read as somewhere in the region of 400-450F (200-230C), though period sources vary. At the upper end grated coconut colours very fast; 400F (200C) is a safer reading for the pastry-lined version, which the recipe gives at an hour or more.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone and pounded down as needed. "Finely-powdered" means what we would call caster sugar; 8 oz is about 1 heaped cup.
- Grated cocoa-nutThe original means fresh coconut, grated on a box grater and still moist. Unsweetened desiccated coconut is far drier and will make the pudding sandy. If using desiccated, soak 6 oz in 4-5 tablespoons of warm milk or coconut milk for twenty minutes and use that.
- Rice-flourStill sold as rice flour, and not interchangeable with cornflour. In the paste it does the job of shortening the gluten, giving a crumbly, biscuit-like crust rather than a flaky one.
- The mouldThe recipe specifies only a 'tin mould'; a plain deep tin of the charlotte or dariole sort is a reasonable guess. A cake tin or a pudding basin of about a litre will serve; butter it heavily, as the plain version has little structure beyond the beaten whites.
- Salt and the butterFresh butter meant unsalted. A pinch of salt added with the sugar keeps the coconut from tasting flat, which it will otherwise do at this ratio of fat to sugar.
- TimingsTwenty minutes at high heat is right for the plain version in a shallow mould; a deeper one needs 30-35 minutes, covered with foil once the top has browned. The pastry-lined version genuinely does need an hour, and the base is better part-baked before filling.
- YieldFour or five as written, and it is very rich. Served cold it firms considerably and slices cleanly; a sharp fruit compote or lemon cream cuts the fat.
Puddings named for titled women filled Victorian cookery books - Duchess, Marchioness, Countess, Empress - a naming habit that borrowed the prestige of the peerage without claiming any particular connection to it, much as restaurant dishes later borrowed the names of singers. What actually dates the recipe is the coconut. Grated cocoa-nut is often said to have become plentiful in British cookery around the middle of the nineteenth century, as colonial trade in the Indian Ocean and West Indies made whole nuts a more common sight in town markets, though the dating is approximate and cocoa-nut puddings and cheesecakes appear in English books earlier. Cassell's, an encyclopaedic dictionary, catalogued such recipes methodically, and the two-part structure here is worth noting: a plain baked version and a grander one lined with rich paste.