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Marlborough Pudding
Warm two ounces of fresh butter, and when soft, without being thoroughly melted, stir until it resembles cream; add two ounces of powdered or sifted sugar, and two well-beaten eggs, and mix all together. When done, line a small piedish with puff-paste, placing a border also round the edge; cover the bottom with a layer of apricot or strawberry jam; pour in the mixture, and bake from twenty to twenty-five minutes. We would suggest, that instead of the dish being lined with puff-paste, a few thin slices of spongecake should be substituted, as the paste is likely to be sodden and indigestible. Probale cost, 7d. Sufficient for three persons.
A small jam tart with a thin egg-and-butter custard poured over it — closer to a Bakewell filling than to a pudding in the boiled sense. The quantities are tiny, so the balance of tin size to filling matters more than anything else.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. For puff paste that has to rise and colour in twenty minutes, something in the region of 400-425F suits; if you take the sponge-cake option instead, 350F should be enough, since only the egg mixture needs to set.
- The hinge: cream the butter, do not melt it"Soft, without being thoroughly melted" is the whole technique. Melted butter will not hold air or emulsify with the eggs, and the filling separates into a greasy layer over a thin custard. Work it to the consistency of thick cream first, then beat in the sugar, then the eggs a little at a time.
- Pie-dish sizeTwo ounces each of butter and sugar with two eggs is roughly a cup of filling. A 6 to 7 inch shallow dish or tart tin is right; anything larger and the layer is too thin to set as a custard.
- Powdered or sifted sugarThis is caster sugar, not modern icing sugar with its cornflour. Ordinary granulated sugar works but needs longer creaming to dissolve.
- Puff paste versus sponge cakeThe book's own aside is sound: raw puff paste under a wet filling steams rather than bakes. If you use pastry, blind-bake the base before adding the jam. The sponge-cake version behaves like a very small trifle base and absorbs the jam's syrup.
- JamUse about three tablespoons of a thick preserve. A loose, high-water jam will bubble up through the custard and scorch at the edges.
- DonenessTwenty to twenty-five minutes is about right at the temperatures above. The centre should be just set with a slight wobble; baked until firm all through, the egg curdles and weeps.
- Yield and the price"Sufficient for three persons" is honest — this is a small dish. The recipe also gives a probable cost of 7d.
Marlborough pudding belongs to a family of English tarts — Marlborough, Manchester, Bakewell — built on the same idea: a lined dish, a layer of jam or lemon, and an enriched egg mixture poured over and baked. The name is generally traced to the Wiltshire town or the ducal title rather than to any documented inventor; the apple-and-cream Marlborough pies recorded in New England share little with it but the word. What is most characteristic of Cassell's here is the editorial interruption: the compilers not only give the received method but argue with it, suggesting sponge cake because underbaked puff paste beneath a wet filling was known to come out "sodden and indigestible." Digestibility was a preoccupation of late-Victorian domestic writing, and in a dictionary of cookery aimed at middle-class households a pudding that sat badly was a pudding that had failed.