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Orange Marmalade Pudding, Baked
Mix a large table-spoonful of orange marmalade with two table-spoonfuls of powdered loaf sugar, two ounces of clarified butter, and a dessert-spoonful of fine flour. Beat the mixture well until it is quite free from lumps, then add two well-whisked eggs; line a pie-dish with good puff-paste, pour in the mixture, and bake in a brisk oven. If preferred, the flour may be omitted. Time to bake, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A Victorian marmalade tart in all but name: a shallow puff-paste case holding a small quantity of enriched, egg-set marmalade. The filling is tiny, so the pie-dish should be correspondingly small.
- The hinge: use a small dishOne tablespoon of marmalade plus two eggs makes barely a cupful of filling. In a full-sized pie dish it will bake to a dry smear; use a 6-inch tin or shallow dish so the layer is at least half an inch deep.
- Brisk oven'Brisk' is usually reckoned as somewhere around 400-425F/200-220C, the sort of heat puff paste needs to lift; the book itself gives no temperature. Twenty minutes at that heat should set the egg filling and colour the pastry at roughly the same moment.
- Powdered loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in cones and crushed at home; powdered loaf sugar is what we call caster or superfine sugar. Two tablespoons is about 25 g.
- Dessert-spoonfulA dessert spoon is two teaspoons. The flour firms the filling and helps stop it weeping, and the recipe is right that it can be left out for a softer, curd-like set.
- Clarified butterTwo ounces is about 55 g. Clarified butter was used because it keeps and because the removed milk solids will not scorch; ordinary melted unsalted butter works, though the filling will brown a shade faster.
- Line, do not blind-bakeThe instruction is to line the dish and pour the mixture straight in. With a wet filling and only twenty minutes in the oven, the base will be soft rather than crisp -- chilling the lined dish hard before filling helps.
- Cost and yieldSixpence was a genuinely cheap sweet for the period. Two or three portions is accurate, but they are small ones; double everything for a proper dessert for four to six.
To modern eyes this is a tart rather than a pudding -- the Victorian word covered almost anything sweet, baked or boiled, that finished a meal. The dish belongs to a family of thrift puddings built on a spoonful of preserve: jam, lemon cheese or marmalade beaten with butter, sugar and egg to make a filling out of almost nothing. Orange marmalade had by the later nineteenth century become an everyday British store-cupboard item rather than a luxury, made at home each winter from imported Seville oranges or bought ready-potted, and cookery books of the period lean on it constantly for flavouring puddings, sauces and cakes. The recipe notes that the flour may be omitted, and gives a costing of sixpence.