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MARMALDE, ORANGE, PUDDING (another way)
Separate the yolks from the whites of half a dozen fresh eggs, beat the yolks in one basin, and half the whites in another. Mix together three or four ounces of clarified butter and a quarter of a pound of marmalade, with as much sugar as will sweeten, and then mix with the beaten eggs, stirring in the whites when the mixture has been well worked with a wooden spoon for five minutes. Bake in a buttered dish. Time, three-quarters of an hour to bake. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for four or five persons. (See also GOLDEN PUDDING.)
A flourless baked pudding that is essentially a marmalade custard: eggs, butter, preserve and sugar, nothing more. It behaves like a soufflé-custard hybrid, so the oven matters more than anything else in the method.
- Gentle heat is the hingeNo temperature is given at all. With this much egg and no flour or breadcrumb to protect it, bake at 325F; anything hotter curdles the custard into a weeping, grainy mass. A roasting tin of hot water around the dish is worth the trouble.
- Clarified butterThree to four ounces is 6-8 tablespoons. Clarified butter here is not fussiness: the water in whole butter would loosen an already delicate set. Melt butter, skim, and pour off the clear fat, leaving the milky sediment behind.
- Half the whitesSix yolks and three whites. The three spare whites are not waste in a Victorian kitchen but will be in yours; keep them for meringue or an omelette. The half-quantity of white is deliberate, giving richness without rubberiness.
- "As much sugar as will sweeten"Marmalade is already sweet and sharp. Two tablespoons is enough for most modern preserves; taste the mixture before the whites go in, since raw yolk and marmalade taste much as the finished pudding will.
- MarmaladeA quarter pound is about 1/3 cup packed. A coarse-cut bitter Seville marmalade gives the contrast the dish is built on; a sweet thin-cut breakfast marmalade leaves it cloying.
- Beating the whitesThe whites are beaten separately and folded in last, so fold rather than stir once they join the mixture. The five minutes of working with a wooden spoon applies to the butter, marmalade, sugar and yolks only.
- Dish and timingA buttered 1.5-quart dish. Forty-five minutes at the lower heat should leave the centre just set with a faint wobble; it will puff and then sink a little as it cools, which is normal for an eggy pudding with no flour.
- Yield and costFour or five portions, as stated. The shilling is a period price note, not information you need.
Marmalade began as the Portuguese marmelada, a stiff quince paste sliceable with a knife, and only drifted toward the loose citrus preserve we know after Seville oranges became a reliable winter import into Britain; the Scottish trade, Dundee above all, is generally credited with fixing the orange version in the national larder. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the later nineteenth century, marmalade was common enough in middle-class houses that it turns up here as a pudding base rather than only at breakfast. The construction itself is older than the ingredient: rich, flourless puddings of eggs, butter, sugar and a preserve are usually seen as a development of the eighteenth-century transparent and amber puddings, where the fruit paste supplied both flavour and colour. The cross-reference to Golden Pudding is the dictionary's way of admitting that the same handful of ingredients, differently handled, filled a dozen entries.