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Potato Flour Pudding, Steamed
Pour a pint of boiling milk, nicely flavoured, upon a smooth paste, made of three table-spoonfuls of potato flour mixed with a little cold milk; add a little sugar and six well-beaten eggs. Butter a plain round mould rather thickly, and ornament it prettily with alternate rows of stoned raisins and candied fruits. Pour in the pudding, lay a piece of oiled paper upon it, and cover closely. Place the mould upon a plate turned upside down in a saucepan containing boiling water about three inches in depth, and be very careful that the water does not overflow the top. Keep the water boiling until the pudding is done enough. Turn it carefully upon a hot dish, and send sweet sauce to table in a tureen. If a richer pudding is required, cream may be used instead of milk. Time to steam, an hour and a half. Probable cost, if made with milk, 1s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A steamed starch-thickened custard, essentially a moulded blancmange enriched with eggs. The technique is straightforward; the main adjustment is heat control.
- Potato flourThis is potato starch, sold today as potato starch or fécula, not the dense potato flour milled from whole cooked potatoes. Cornflour behaves similarly but sets slightly firmer; arrowroot is the closer substitute if starch is unavailable.
- Keep the water at a bare simmerSix eggs to a pint of milk is a rich custard, and a hard rolling boil for ninety minutes will curdle it and weep water into the mould. Bring the pan to the boil, then hold it at a lazy simmer for the whole time and top up with boiling water from a kettle as it evaporates.
- "Nicely flavoured" milkThe period assumption is an infusion: a split vanilla pod, a strip of lemon peel, a bay leaf or a blade of cinnamon steeped in the milk as it heats, then strained out before it meets the starch paste.
- Temper the eggsThe boiling milk goes onto the cold starch paste, not the reverse, and the mixture should be allowed to cool below scalding before the beaten eggs go in, or they will scramble in threads.
- The mould and the plateThe mixture comes to roughly a pint and a half, so allow a mould of about two pints (a charlotte tin or pudding basin) to leave headroom for the slight rise. The upturned plate is simply a trivet to keep the base off the hot metal; a folded cloth or a metal steamer rack does the same job.
- CoveringOiled paper against the surface stops a skin forming; over that, foil or a pleated paper cover tied with string keeps condensation out. The pleat matters, as the pudding rises a little.
- Doneness"Done enough" means set to the centre. A skewer inserted midway should come out clean, or an instant-read thermometer should show 175-180F. At an hour and a half the custard will be well past merely set, so start checking at seventy minutes.
- Turning outRest the mould five minutes before inverting, or the still-liquid centre will slump. Butter the mould heavily as instructed, since the raisins and candied fruit pressed against the sides are what make the finished shape worth looking at.
- Cost and yieldOne shilling was the estimate for the milk version, and the pudding serves four or five. The sweet sauce sent separately might have been a custard, wine or arrowroot sauce.
Potato starch reached British kitchens in quantity during the nineteenth century as one of a family of cheap refined thickeners — arrowroot, sago, tapioca, cornflour — that let a cook produce a smooth, pale, reliably setting pudding. Steamed and moulded puddings were a large class in this period, and a British kitchen range arguably gave better control over a pan of simmering water than over an oven. The decoration is the point of the dish: raisins and candied fruit pressed into the buttered mould in rows appear right side out when the pudding is turned onto its hot dish, a piece of table theatre of a kind also found in French moulded entremets, here within reach of a middle-class household at a shilling.