Home › The Principles of Cookery › Queen Adelaide's Pudding
Queen Adelaide's Pudding
Beat eight ounces of fresh butter to a cream. Mix with it eight ounces of finely-sifted sugar, half a pound of dried flour, two ounces of thinly-sliced candied peel, four ounces of picked and dried currants, and a quarter of a tea-spoonful of essence of almonds or essence of lemon. Whisk the yolks and whites of six fresh eggs, first separately, and afterwards together. Add them to the other ingredients, and beat the mixture for several minutes. Pour it into a well-buttered mould, cover with buttered paper, and afterwards tie in a cloth, and boil or steam the pudding. Turn it out carefully on a hot dish, and pour wine sauce round but not over it. Time to boil, two hours and a half. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A rich boiled pudding built like a pound cake — equal weights of butter, sugar and flour — with the eggs doing all the lifting. The points below cover the vessel, the steaming and the ingredients that have changed names.
- Weights in cupsEight ounces of butter is two sticks; eight ounces of sugar is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons; half a pound of flour is roughly 1¾ cups. Weighing is far more reliable here, since the batter has no chemical leavening to forgive a heavy hand with the flour.
- "Dried flour"Victorian cooks warmed flour in a low oven or by the fire to drive off damp before creaming it into butter. Modern bagged flour is dry enough; skip the step, but do sift, as the recipe's success depends on the flour going in without lumps.
- Essence of almondsPeriod almond essence was frequently based on bitter-almond oil, far stronger than what is sold today, which may explain why so small a quantity is specified. Use modern almond extract, which is benzaldehyde-based, at the same small quantity — it overwhelms everything if you double it.
- Candied peel and currantsCandied citron and orange peel, sliced thin rather than the chopped mixed peel sold for fruitcake. "Picked" currants means stems and grit removed; today's dried currants need only a rinse and a thorough drying, since wet fruit sinks.
- The mould and the clothA 1½ to 2 quart pudding basin or metal mould, buttered heavily, filled no more than two-thirds. Buttered parchment over the top, then a cloth tied under the rim, keeps condensation out of the batter — this is the step people skip and then wonder why the top is sodden.
- Boiling versus steamingThe recipe permits either. To steam, set the mould on a rack in a covered pot with water partway up its sides at a bare simmer; to boil, immerse it further. Either way keep the water at a gentle simmer and top up with boiling water so the level never drops, since a hard boil rocks the mould and can force water past the covering.
- Time and donenessTwo and a half hours is right for a full-sized mould. It is done when a skewer comes out clean and the pudding has pulled slightly from the sides; let it stand ten minutes before turning out or it will crack.
- Wine sauceA sweet sauce of butter, sugar and sherry or Madeira, thickened lightly or simply beaten warm. Poured around rather than over so the pudding's surface stays dry and the slices do not collapse.
- YieldFive or six as the book says, though it is very rich; eight small servings is more realistic. The "probable cost, 2s." is a Victorian household budgeting note, not an instruction.
Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen was queen consort to William IV from 1830 to 1837, and the fashion for attaching royal and aristocratic names to puddings, soups and cakes was at its height in her lifetime and long after; such names often reflect a compiler's or cook's flattery rather than any documented connection to the person. The pudding itself is a straightforward creamed butter cake enriched with dried fruit and peel and cooked in a mould over water, a common English method at a time when domestic ovens were not reliable enough to trust with an expensive batter. Steaming gave an even, gentle heat and a moist close crumb, and the shape turned out of the mould was much of the point at table.