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Quaking Pudding
Scald a quart of cream; when almost cold, put to it four well-beaten eggs, a spoonful and a half of flour, some nutmeg, and sugar. Tie the pudding in a buttered cloth, and boil for an hour. Turn it out carefully, lest it should crack. Serve with melted butter, a little wine, and sugar.
A cloth-boiled custard with barely enough flour to hold it together — the "quaking" is the point, and everything in the method serves it. Two things decide success: the temperature of the water and the preparation of the cloth.
- Keep the water at a bare simmerA rolling boil will curdle a custard this lean and split it when you turn it out. The water should shudder rather than bubble, and the pudding should stay covered by it for the full hour.
- The clothA square of close-woven cotton or linen, scalded in boiling water, wrung out, then buttered as the recipe directs; flouring the buttered cloth is a common further precaution against the batter seeping through the weave, though the recipe calls only for butter. Tie loosely — a lean pudding swells.
- A quart of creamFour cups if you are reading this in the US; a British imperial quart is 40 imperial fl oz, or roughly five US cups. Either works, but the larger measure gives a softer set. Nineteenth-century "cream" was probably nearer what we would call single or light cream, around 18 to 20 percent fat, though its richness varied a good deal.
- "A spoonful and a half of flour"Genuinely ambiguous. A Victorian "spoonful" in a book of this kind is normally read as a tablespoon, which for a quart of cream gives an extremely tender pudding that will only just stand; if you want it to turn out reliably, err toward the full measure rather than under.
- Scald, then coolBring the cream just to the point where it steams and shivers at the edge, around 180F, then let it cool right down before the eggs go in. "Almost cold" in the original means just that — well below the temperature at which egg sets; add them hot and you have sweet scrambled egg.
- Nutmeg and sugarNo quantities given. Roughly 1/3 cup sugar and a quarter of a whole nutmeg, freshly grated, suits the volume. Grate the nutmeg last so it does not go dusty in the cream.
- Turning outLift the pudding, let it drain a moment, then untie and invert onto a warmed dish in one movement. Left in the cloth it goes on cooking in its own steam and slumps. A few minutes' rest before unwrapping firms the skin enough to survive the drop.
- The sauce"Melted butter" here is the old drawn-butter sauce — butter worked smooth with a little flour and water, not simply butter melted in a pan — sweetened and let down with sherry or Madeira. A plain wine-and-sugar syrup finished with butter gets you to the same place.
- YieldServes six as a dessert. It is best warm rather than hot, and does not keep.
Quaking pudding appears in English cookery from the seventeenth century onward, and the name is simply descriptive: a pudding so lightly bound that it trembles when set on the dish. Recipes for it turn up in Hannah Glasse and in the manuscript receipt books that preceded her. It belongs to the great family of boiled puddings that dominated English sweet cookery before the domestic oven became reliable — a pot of water and a floured cloth being equipment every kitchen already had.