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Palestine Pudding
Put a quarter of a pound of biscuit flour into a bowl with a quarter of a pound of powdered sugar, a quarter of a small nutmeg, grated, and a pinch of salt. Add gradually a pint of new milk, and beat the mixture with a wooden spoon until it is quite smooth and free from lumps, then put it into a saucepan, with two ounces of fresh butter, and stir it over the fire till it boils and is thick. Pour it out into a shallow dish large enough to contain it, and when it is quite cold and stiff, cut it up into small fancy shapes, and fry them in a little butter, until they are lightly browned. Serve neatly arranged on a hot dish, with lemon-sauce poured round them. The sauce may be made as follows. Put the rind and juice of a fresh lemon into a saucepan, with a quarter of a pint of water and two ounces of loaf sugar, and let them boil until the sugar is dissolved, and the syrup is clear; strain, and serve. Time, about ten minutes to fry the pudding. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
This is a fried milk pudding — a stiff sweet panade cut into shapes and browned in butter, in the same family as Italian crema fritta and Spanish leche frita. The hinge is the setting: the mixture must be cooked thick enough and chilled hard enough to cut cleanly, or the shapes collapse in the pan.
- Biscuit flourIn Victorian British usage this most often meant plain sweet biscuit or rusk dried and ground to a fine powder, rather than a modern branded flour, though the term was used loosely. Fine dry breadcrumbs sieved smooth, or fine semolina, will serve as substitutes.
- Weights and volumesA quarter of a pound is about 115 g, so equal weights of biscuit powder and sugar. The pint is imperial, 20 fl oz or roughly 570 ml, and the quarter pint of water for the sauce is about 140 ml.
- New milk and loaf sugar"New milk" is simply fresh whole milk, unskimmed. Loaf sugar was cut from a cone of refined sugar; granulated sugar dissolves in the syrup just as well.
- NutmegA quarter of a small nutmeg, freshly grated, comes to somewhere between a quarter and a half teaspoon. Grate it at the last moment; it is the only spice in the pudding.
- Cooking the baseStir constantly once it thickens and give it a few minutes past the boil over low heat, or the starch tastes raw. It should be stiff enough to hold a furrow behind the spoon before you pour it out.
- Setting timeThe original says only "quite cold and stiff". Spread it about 1.5 cm deep and refrigerate at least three hours, or overnight; a half-set slab will not survive cutting or frying.
- FryingTen minutes for the whole batch, not per piece — the shapes only need browning on each side in hot butter. Dusting the cut pieces in a little biscuit powder or flour first keeps them from sticking, and clarified butter browns them without burning.
- The lemon saucePare the rind in strips rather than grating it so the syrup strains clear, and add the juice off the heat if you want the flavour sharp. As written it is a thin syrup; reduce it a little if you prefer it to cling.
- YieldFive or six as written, and the pudding base can be made a day ahead. The tenpence given as "probable cost" is a late-Victorian figure and is worth noting only as a period detail.
Cassell's appears to give several dishes the epithet "Palestine", most famously Palestine soup, where the name attaches to the Jerusalem artichoke — often said to be an English pun on girasole that turned a sunflower relative into a biblical place-name, though the derivation is folk etymology rather than established fact. No artichoke appears here, so the title is more likely part of the same Victorian habit of dressing plain nursery puddings in scriptural or geographical names, alongside the Alexandra, Balmoral and Empress puddings that seem to recur in the pudding chapters of the period; the connection is traditional rather than documented. The technique itself is much older and much travelled: a thick milk-and-starch paste, set firm, cut and fried, appears as crema fritta in northern Italy and leche frita in Spain, and English cookery had long done something similar with fried slices of set rice or semolina. Recipes like this one earned their place in a household dictionary because they were cheap, made from storecupboard staples, and could be assembled from the previous day's work — the pudding base set overnight, the frying and the lemon syrup done in the ten minutes before dinner was sent up.