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Raspberry Pudding, Rich
Beat a quarter of a pound of butter to a cream, add a spoonful of sugar, three table-spoonfuls of cream, the beaten yolks of four eggs, and a table-spoonful of raspberry jam. Line a shallow pie-dish with puff-paste. Pour in the mixture, and bake in a well-heated oven till the pastry is done enough. Probable cost, 1s. 3d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
This is a butter-and-yolk curd tart rather than a pudding in the American sense, and the filling is shallow enough that the pastry and the custard have to finish together. Watch the set, not the clock.
- The hinge: set, don't boilFour yolks with butter and cream will curdle if the oven is too fierce for too long. Start hot enough to lift the puff paste, then drop to 325F once the pastry edges have coloured and bake until the centre only just trembles.
- "A well-heated oven"Victorian oven terms were not standardised, but this is usually read as a fairly hot oven, somewhere in the region of 400-425F. Ten to twelve minutes at that heat, then reduce to around 325F for a further 20-25 minutes, works in a modern oven.
- A quarter of a pound of butter4 oz, or one American stick, 115 g. "Beat to a cream" means creamed until pale and aerated, as for a sponge, which is what carries the filling.
- "A spoonful of sugar"Genuinely ambiguous, since the recipe qualifies its other measures as table-spoonfuls but leaves this one bare. Given four yolks and only a tablespoon of jam, a tablespoon of sugar is the sensible reading, and the result is barely sweet by modern taste. Two or three will not harm it.
- The jamOne tablespoon flavours and colours, no more. Many modern jams are looser than a preserve boiled to a firm set, so keep to the single spoonful or the filling may loosen.
- Puff pasteAll-butter puff pastry, rolled thin, in a shallow pie dish; something around 8 inches suits three or four portions. Chill the lined dish before filling; a warm puff base under a wet custard goes sodden.
- Yield and servingThree or four portions, as stated. Serve warm rather than hot, when the butter has firmed enough for the filling to slice cleanly.
- Probable cost1s 3d, as the book gives it, which is a substantial sum for a dish serving three or four.
Cassell's belongs to the era when "pudding" covered almost anything sweet and baked, boiled or steamed, and a filling of creamed butter, yolks and preserve baked in pastry sits in a long English line running back through the lemon and almond "cheesecakes" of Georgian cookery to seventeenth-century sweetmeat tarts. The "rich" in the title is doing real work: it tells the reader which household the recipe is for. Raspberry jam is the practical point of the dish, a way of putting summer fruit into a pastry in the middle of winter, and the very small quantity called for reflects a period when a spoonful of preserve was a flavouring to be measured rather than an ingredient to be spooned freely.