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Pomfret Puddings
Rub the rind of a fresh lemon upon two or three lumps of sugar until all the yellow part is taken off. Add a little more sugar to make the weight up to a quarter of a pound, then crush the sugar to powder. Beat a quarter of a pound of butter to a cream. Add a pinch of salt, two well-whisked eggs, the powdered sugar, and a quarter of a pound of flour, and beat the mixture briskly for two or three minutes. Three-parts fill some small cups with it, and bake in a brisk oven. When the puddings are done enough, turn them out upon a hot dish, and send wine sauce to table in a tureen. Time to bake, fifteen to twenty minutes. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for half a dozen cups.
A creamed-butter sponge in the pound-cake proportion, baked in small cups — the Victorian ancestor of the individual baked pudding. Everything hinges on the lemon sugar and on beating the butter properly.
- Weights, in cupsA quarter of a pound is 4 oz of each of butter, sugar and flour: one stick of butter, a scant ½ cup plus a tablespoon of sugar, and a scant cup of plain flour. Weighing is easier and truer than measuring here, since the whole point is that the three are equal.
- Rubbing the lemon on sugarThis is the instruction that matters. Rubbing loaf sugar against the rind tears the oil cells and carries the oil into the sugar, which gives a cleaner, stronger lemon flavour than grated zest. Use unwaxed lemon and sugar cubes, rub until the cubes are yellow and damp, then crush them and make the weight up to 4 oz.
- "Brisk oven"Brisk is usually read as somewhere around 400–425F. These are small and set fast at that heat, but they colour quickly, so watch from twelve minutes; a skewer should come out clean.
- "Small cups"Victorian dariole moulds or teacups of about 4–5 fl oz. Buttered ramekins or a deep muffin tin do the same job. Three-parts full is deliberate — the batter has no chemical raising and rises only from the whisked eggs, but it will still climb.
- Beating the butter"Beat to a cream" means the butter must be soft enough to take air, roughly 65F. Two or three minutes of brisk beating after the flour goes in is more than a modern cook would give it; stop once the batter is smooth or the crumb tightens.
- Wine sauceA common period wine sauce is butter, sugar and sherry or Madeira, sometimes thickened with a little flour or cornflour, served hot in a tureen and poured at table; other period versions are thickened with egg. Whichever is used, it should not boil hard once the wine is in.
- YieldSix cups, one per person, and they are best turned out and eaten within a few minutes of leaving the oven — they dry as they cool. "Probable cost, 8d" is Cassell's standard costing note, not an instruction.
Pomfret is the old contracted spelling of Pontefract in the West Riding of Yorkshire, a name most often met with in the kitchen through Pomfret cakes, the stamped liquorice discs associated with the town from at least the eighteenth century. No liquorice appears here, and the recipe itself gives no link between the town and the pudding; like a good many named puddings in Victorian dictionaries of cookery, the title may simply record where a particular cook or household served it. What the recipe does show is the familiar pound-cake proportion — equal weights of butter, sugar and flour, with two eggs — baked in small cups rather than boiled in a cloth, and dressed up for the table with a wine sauce.