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Newmarket Pudding
Put a pint and a quarter of good milk into a saucepan, with three ounces of sugar, a bay-leaf, the thin rind of half a lemon, and a little piece of stick cinnamon. Simmer gently for ten minutes. Let the milk cool, then mix with it the well-whisked yolks of five and the whites of three fresh eggs. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve. Butter a pie-dish. Put a layer of thin bread and butter at the bottom, then a layer of currants and stoned-and-chopped raisins. Repeat until the dish is nearly full. Pour the custard over, let the bread soak for an hour, and bake in a moderate oven. Time, about three-quarters of an hour to bake. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A bread-and-butter pudding enriched with a flavoured custard. The only real technique is the custard: get its temperature right and the rest looks after itself.
- The hinge: cool the milk before adding eggsThe recipe says it plainly and it matters. Infused milk straight off the heat will scramble the yolks; let it drop to lukewarm, then whisk it into the eggs, not the eggs into it.
- MeasuresA pint and a quarter is an imperial pint and a quarter, about 25 fl oz or 3 cups of milk. Three ounces of sugar is a scant half cup. Five yolks plus three whites gives a custard richer than one made with whole eggs alone.
- A moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; 'moderate' is conventionally read as somewhere around 325-350F, with the lower end suiting a custard. At three-quarters of an hour a dish of this depth should be just set with a slight wobble at the centre; a knife inserted an inch from the edge should come out clean.
- Water bathNot specified, and not strictly needed, but setting the pie-dish in a roasting tin of hot water guards against the custard curdling at the edges before the middle sets.
- Bread and butterA day-old white loaf, sliced thin, buttered, crusts left on or off as you like. Fresh bread turns to paste. Cut the slices to fit the dish so the layers sit flat and the currants do not all sink to one corner.
- The infusionBay leaf with lemon rind and cinnamon in milk is a Victorian standard and worth keeping; pare the rind with no white pith. Straining the mixture catches the aromatics and any stringy albumen.
- Stoned raisinsRaisins of this period generally came with seeds, hence 'stoned'. Modern seedless raisins need only chopping, and a brief soak in hot water or a spoonful of sherry keeps them from scorching on the surface.
- The hour's soakDo not skip it. Bread that goes into the oven dry will float and stay dry inside while the custard around it sets.
- YieldFive or six, as stated, from a pie-dish of roughly 2 to 2½ pints (1.2-1.4 litres). Best warm rather than hot.
Newmarket, the Suffolk racing town, lent its name to a small family of nineteenth-century puddings, and as with Chester and Manchester puddings the geographical label tells you more about how Victorian cookery writers organised their repertoire than about any documented local origin. The dish itself is a bread-and-butter pudding dressed up: the frugal English habit of soaking buttered bread in custard, lifted by a proper infused custard base with bay, lemon and cinnamon, plus dried fruit and an unequal ratio of yolks to whites that gives richness without rubberiness. It was priced at a shilling for five or six persons, and the costings are a reminder of what such books were for: a middle-class household with a cook needed to know not just how a dish was made but what it would come to.