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Richmond Puddings
Bake three large apples. Scrape out every particle of pulp free from skin and core, and mix with it two ounces of fresh butter, four ounces of finely-grated bread-crumbs, three table-spoonfuls of sugar, a little grated nutmeg or rasped lemon-rind, add half a pint of cream or milk, the yolks of four and the whites of two eggs. Mix thoroughly. Butter some cups, half fill them with the mixture, sprinkle a few bread-crumbs over the top, and bake in a well-heated oven. When done enough, turn the puddings out carefully upon a hot dish, sift powdered sugar over them, and send a light custard to table with them. Time to bake, twenty minutes. Probable cost, if made with milk, 1s. 3d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A baked-apple charlotte mixture set with egg and turned out of individual moulds. The success of it lies almost entirely in the moulds being properly prepared and only half filled.
- Half fill, and mean itThe mixture rises considerably as the egg sets, so half-filled cups are not caution but instruction. Filled higher, they dome, crack and stick, and will not turn out cleanly.
- The cupsButtered ramekins, dariole moulds or teacups; note that the quantity given, half-filled for five or six, implies fairly capacious cups rather than small ones. Butter generously, and dusting the inside with fine crumbs as well as the top will help the pudding release. Let them stand a minute out of the oven before inverting.
- "A well-heated oven"The book gives no temperature; for a custard-type mixture in moulds a moderately hot oven, in the region of 350-375F, is the safer reading. Stand the moulds in a roasting tin if your oven runs hot at the base; twenty minutes should leave the centres just set and slightly wobbling.
- Half a pintAn Imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. Cream gives a richer, firmer set; whole milk works, as the original cost note assumes.
- The applesThree large baking apples, ideally a tart cooker such as Bramley, yield roughly 1½ cups of pulp once scraped free of skin and core. Bake them dry, not in water, or the mixture will be too loose to hold.
- BreadcrumbsFresh soft crumbs from a day-old loaf, finely grated, not dried or packaged crumbs, which absorb far more liquid and turn the puddings dense.
- The egg countFour yolks and two whites, not three whole eggs: the yolks enrich and set, and the reduced quantity of white keeps the texture soft rather than rubbery.
- The custard to send with themA thin pouring custard, stirred over gentle heat to about 175F and never allowed to boil. Yield is five or six small puddings, as stated.
Cassell's gives the name without explanation, as Victorian cookery books usually did for the great many dishes titled after places, houses and public figures; Richmond appears attached to several sweet and savoury preparations of the period, and the association is traditional rather than documented. The pudding itself belongs to a large English family of apple-and-crumb puddings that grew out of the eighteenth-century charlotte and the older custom of thickening sweet dishes with grated bread rather than flour. Baking in buttered cups and turning out is often said to have been fashionable in the later nineteenth century, when individual moulds are generally thought to have become cheaper and more widely available, and it allowed a modest quantity of apple, cream and egg to be served as several handsome portions. The costing of 1s 3d is characteristic of Cassell's, which set out to tell a household exactly what a dish would take from the week's money.