Home › The Principles of Cookery › Paris Pudding
Paris Pudding
Put a pint of new milk into a saucepan with three small table-spoonfuls of ground rice; stir it over the fire until it thickens, and when it is nearly cold, mix with it the yolks of four and the whites of two eggs, together with three ounces of finely-shredded beef suet, three ounces of chopped apples, weighed after they are peeled and cored, two table-spoonfuls of chopped raisins, two table-spoonfuls of powdered rusks or finely-grated bread-crumbs, and a table-spoonful of good jam. Blanch and pound twelve sweet almonds and two bitter ones, mix with them a quarter of a pound of powdered sugar, four ounces of minced candied peel, a grated nutmeg, and two or three drops of vanilla essence. Add the flavourings to the rest of the ingredients, and beat all together for some minutes. A table-spoonful of brandy may be added or not; pour the mixture into a well oiled mould, which it will quite fill, cover it with a sheet of oiled paper, tie it in a cloth, put into boiling water, and keep it boiling quickly for two hours.
A boiled suet-and-ground-rice pudding of the elaborate Victorian sort, but it calls for bitter almonds, which is why it cannot be made as printed.
- Bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are crushed and moistened — exactly what pounding them in a mortar does. Their sale for food use is restricted or prohibited in many countries today, and the Victorian habit of slipping two or three into a sweet pudding for marzipan flavour is not one to reproduce. Use a current recipe if you want a pudding of this type.
- Why the quantity mattersTwo nuts in a pudding of this size is a small dose, and generations ate such puddings without harm, but the toxin load of an individual bitter almond varies widely and boiling in a covered mould drives off only part of the cyanide. There is no way to judge the margin at home, which is the whole objection.
- New milk"New milk" is simply fresh whole milk, as opposed to skimmed or the previous day's. A pint here is the imperial pint, 20 fl oz, about 2.5 US cups.
- Ground rice and rusksGround rice is rice flour, coarser than the modern baking sort; rusks are twice-baked dry bread, sold as such in some places and interchangeable with dried breadcrumbs, as the recipe itself allows.
- Beef suetShredded beef suet is still sold in the UK, boxed and floured; in North America ask a butcher for kidney fat and grate it frozen. Vegetable suet behaves similarly in a boiled pudding.
- The mould and the clothThe mould is filled to the brim, and with no raising agent a pudding of this composition sets rather than rises; the oiled paper and cloth are there to keep water out. The recipe says only to tie it in a cloth, put it into boiling water and keep it boiling quickly for two hours.
- YieldA pint of milk plus the fruit, nuts and peel suggests a mould of roughly 1.5 pints; the recipe states no yield, so any serving number is an estimate.
Victorian cookery writing gives a great many puddings a national or civic name — Paris, Vienna, Cabinet, Chancellor — usually with no traceable connection to the place, the label serving as a mark of refinement rather than provenance. What distinguishes this one from a plain boiled suet pudding is its richness of flavourings: candied peel, nutmeg, brandy, vanilla essence and pounded almonds, the last a very old European technique for giving a milk pudding body and a marzipan perfume. The bitter almonds are the giveaway of the period. Before commercial almond extract was cheap and reliable, cooks reached for a couple of bitter kernels, or the equivalent from apricot or peach stones, to sharpen the flavour of sweet almonds — a practice that persisted in print well into the twentieth century and is now recognised as a real hazard. The pudding itself was boiled, sealed in a cloth over a pot.