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Neufchatel Pudding
Beat the yolks of four eggs briskly for three or four minutes, then put them into a saucepan, and with them the whites of two eggs, eight ounces of fresh butter, and four ounces of pounded and sifted sugar. Stir gently over a slow fire for twenty minutes or more. Line a pie-dish with good puff-paste. Spread on the bottom a layer of either orange marmalade or apricot jam, pour the mixture on the top, and bake in a good oven. Sift a little sugar over the pudding before serving. Time to bake, about a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for four persons.
This is a curd tart in all but name: an egg-and-butter custard cooked to a thick cream on the stove, then poured over jam in a pastry case and set in the oven. The hinge is the stovetop stage, which must never approach a simmer.
- Cook the curd over waterCook the curd gently -- Twenty minutes of "stir gently over a slow fire" is easiest to manage in a bain-marie, though the recipe simply says a saucepan over a slow fire. Set the pan over barely simmering water and keep the mixture below about 180F; direct heat on a modern burner risks scrambling the yolks well before twenty minutes are up.
- "A good oven"Probably somewhere in the region of 400-425F, though the book gives no temperatures. The pastry needs enough heat to set and colour in the quarter of an hour given, since the filling goes in already cooked and only needs to firm and take on a light skin.
- Blind-bake the baseFifteen minutes at that heat will not cook the underside of raw puff paste beneath a wet filling. Bake the lined dish blind until dry and pale, then add jam and custard for the final short bake.
- Pounded and sifted sugarEffectively caster sugar. Much Victorian sugar still came in loaves that had to be broken down and sieved, though other grades were also available; a modern fine granulated or caster sugar goes straight in.
- The butter ratioEight ounces of butter to four of sugar and four yolks plus two whites makes a rich, barely sweet curd — closer to a French crème than a lemon curd. The marmalade or apricot layer is doing most of the sweetening, so do not stint on it.
- Pie-dishA shallow oval or round earthenware dish of roughly 8-9 inches. A metal tart tin of the same diameter works and browns the pastry better.
- Yield and servingFour generous portions as written, six if served with cream. It is best warm rather than hot; the curd firms as it cools and slices cleanly at room temperature.
- Probable cost1s. 6d. is the household-budget note Cassell's attaches to nearly every entry — useful for dating the book, of no use at the till.
Cassell's belongs to the era when an English pudding gained standing by taking a French name, and "Neufchatel" here is likely decorative rather than descriptive: there is no cheese in the dish, and nothing ties it to the Norman town of Neufchâtel-en-Bray or its soft cheese beyond the borrowed prestige of the word. What the recipe actually is is a curd tart, a form English kitchens had been making for centuries with cheese curds, though here the filling is a butter-and-egg custard cooked on the stove before it ever meets pastry. The technique is identical to lemon curd minus the acid, and the jam layer beneath is the tell-tale sign of a household recipe built around preserves already in the store cupboard, the recipe simply offering either marmalade or apricot.