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Potato Flour Pudding, Baked
Boil the thin rind of a lemon, or any other flavouring that may be preferred, in a quart of milk. Mix three table-spoonfuls of potato flour to a smooth paste with a little cold milk, pour the hot liquid upon this, and stir it until it is cool. Add a little sugar, from three to five well-beaten eggs, and a little brandy or sherry if liked. Orange marmalade stirred into the pudding is by many considered an improvement. The pudding may be baked before the fire in an American or Dutch oven for twenty minutes. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A plain milk custard thickened with potato starch — closer to a set pudding than a baked egg custard, and more forgiving because of the starch. Two things need translating: the flour itself and the fireside oven.
- The hinge: cool the base before the eggsThe starch base must be stirred until genuinely cool, not merely warm, before the beaten eggs go in. Add them to hot milk and you get threads of scrambled egg through the pudding, and stirring as it cools also prevents a skin and lumping.
- Potato flour is potato starchWhat the book calls potato flour is the fine white starch sold today as potato starch (fécula), not the modern grey-beige potato flour milled from whole dried potato. Three tablespoons of starch to a quart of milk gives a soft set; whole-potato flour would be gritty and absorbent and is not a substitute.
- A quart of milkAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, so about 5 US cups. If you scale to 4 cups, drop the starch to about 2½ tablespoons. Whole milk gives the best texture.
- American or Dutch ovenBoth terms here mean a reflector oven — an open-fronted metal box set facing the fire, radiating fierce heat onto the dish. It is not the modern cast-iron casserole. In a conventional oven, bake at 325F.
- The twenty minutes will not doTwenty minutes implies fierce radiant fireside heat, probably on a fairly shallow dish, though the recipe does not say. A quart of egg-and-milk mixture in a modern oven at 325F needs roughly 45 to 60 minutes, until the centre is just set with a slight wobble. A dish of water beneath or around it keeps the edges from curdling.
- Eggs and sugar"From three to five" is a real choice: three gives a soft, starch-led pudding, five a richer, firmer one. "A little sugar" is undefined — 2 to 3 tablespoons suits Victorian taste, and more if you are not adding marmalade.
- FlavouringPare the lemon rind thin with no white pith and infuse it in the scalding milk; the recipe does not say to strain it out before the milk meets the starch, but it is worth doing. The recipe offers orange marmalade as an option "by many considered an improvement" without a quantity; a couple of tablespoons stirred in is a reasonable reading.
- YieldAs stated, four or five servings. Allow for a mixture of roughly 1.3 to 1.4 litres, so a dish of at least 1½ imperial quarts (about 2 US quarts) rather than a snug one.
Potato starch reached British kitchens in quantity during the nineteenth century, when it was sold under names like farina and potato flour and promoted as a cheaper, blander rival to arrowroot and imported sago for thickening puddings, soups and invalid food. Cassell's places this in the pudding family that runs from ground rice to cornflour blancmange: a quart of milk, a starch, a few eggs, a strip of lemon peel, and a spoonful of spirits if the household ran to it. The costing — a shilling for four or five people — is typical of such entries, and a starch pudding of this kind let a cook stretch a small number of expensive eggs into something substantial. The direction to bake it "before the fire" in a reflector oven is a reminder of how recently the closed range was still optional; the same book assumes a reader who might be working at an open hearth or a coal oven, and gives the flavouring choice as freely as the equipment.