Home › The Principles of Cookery › Puddings for Invalids
Puddings for Invalids
The simpler and lighter puddings for invalids are the more easily they will be digested. Wine or brandy should only be put into them when specially ordered, and as to sugar, cream, and flavouring, the taste of the patient should be ascertained before these are added. Sick people have generally a great objection to highly-flavoured dishes. The following is a light little pudding, and can be quickly prepared. Beat a tea-spoonful of flour to a smooth paste, and pour over it a tea-cupful of boiling milk, which has been lightly flavoured with lemon or cinnamon. Add a pinch of salt and a tea-spoonful of sugar, and stir until the latter is dissolved. When the milk is cold, strain it, and stir into it a well-beaten egg. Pour the custard into a buttered basin, and bake in a moderate oven. Turn it out upon a hot plate, and, if approved, serve with a glassful of sherry or a little jam. Time to bake, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 3d.
A single-serving baked custard thickened with a trace of flour, written for a sickroom tray. The proportions are small and the margin for error narrow, so treat it as a custard first and a pudding second.
- The hinge: cool the milk before the eggThe instruction to wait until the flavoured milk is cold is the whole recipe. Stirring a beaten egg into hot milk will scramble it, and the strained mixture will bake grainy rather than setting smooth.
- A tea-cupfulVictorian teacups run smaller than modern mugs: reckon somewhere around 5 to 6 fl oz, roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of a cup. With one egg to that volume you get a soft, spoonable set rather than a firm slice.
- Moderate ovenConventionally reckoned at about 340-350F, though the book gives no temperatures. Twenty minutes suits a single small basin; the custard is done when the centre still wobbles slightly and a knife slipped in comes out clean, around 170-175F internally.
- Basin and water bathA "basin" here is a small ovenproof pudding bowl, roughly 6-8 oz capacity. The book omits it, but standing the basin in a roasting tin of hot water keeps the edges from setting into rubber before the middle cooks.
- Straining mattersStraining catches the lumps from the flour paste, and would also catch whatever was used for flavour if it was lemon peel or a cinnamon stick, which the recipe leaves unspecified. Ground cinnamon will not strain out and gives a gritty custard.
- Turning it outLoosen the edge with a knife before inverting. The recipe directs a hot plate, but a custard this soft may slump if turned out the instant it leaves the oven.
- Yield and the sherryOne portion. The sherry is served with the pudding rather than baked into it, and the book's own preamble says wine or brandy should go in only when specially ordered.
- Probable cost3d. is threepence in pre-decimal currency; the book quotes a probable cost for its recipes as a matter of course.
Invalid cookery had a chapter in many large Victorian household manuals, and Cassell's is no exception: with long convalescences at home, the cook was expected to produce food for the sickroom as a matter of routine. The governing theory was that illness weakened the digestion, so the sickroom repertoire ran to milk, eggs, arrowroot, gruel, beef tea and plain baked custards of exactly this kind - nourishment stripped of spice, richness and, unless a doctor ordered otherwise, alcohol. The note that "sick people have generally a great objection to highly-flavoured dishes" reflects observation as much as doctrine, and the instruction to ask the patient's taste before adding sugar or cream is a reminder that these small puddings were made to order, one basin at a time, for someone upstairs.