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Rotterdam Pudding, Rich
Beat four ounces and a half of fine flour to a smooth paste with half a pint of milk, and add four ounces and a half of sugar and a small pinch of salt. Blanch and pound four ounces and a half of sweet almonds, and whilst pounding drop in a little cold water to keep them from oiling. Put four ounces and a half of butter into a saucepan with half a pint of milk. Let it remain until the butter is melted, then stir in the paste of flour and milk, and keep stirring the mixture over the fire until it bois and becomes thick, when it may be poured out to cool. Add the blanched and pounded almonds, then stir in first the well-beaten yolks of nine eggs, and afterwards the whites of the eggs whisked till firm. Beat the pudding briskly for a few minutes, pour it into a buttered basin which it will fill, tie it in a cloth, and let it boil without ceasing until done enough. Turn it out carefully, and send wine sauce to table with it. Time to boil, one hour and a half. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A boiled almond pudding built on a milk panada, lightened with nine eggs. The method is sound; only the units, the almond work and the vessel need translating.
- The odd 4½ ouncesFour and a half ounces recurs four times: flour, sugar, almonds and butter. That is about 128 g, near enough; treat all four as equal weights of about 125 g each and the balance holds.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, or 285 ml — a shade under 1¼ US cups. There are two of them here, so 570 ml of milk in total, one half for the flour paste and one half for the butter.
- The hinge: cook the panada properlyThe flour-and-milk paste must be stirred over heat until it boils and thickens into a stiff choux-like mass, and then be cooled before the eggs go in. Undercooked, the pudding tastes of raw flour; too hot when the yolks are added, and it scrambles.
- Sweet almonds and the water trick"Sweet" almonds are simply ordinary almonds, named to distinguish them from bitter almonds, which are restricted or hard to buy in many places today. Blanched almonds ground in a processor will oil and clump exactly as the original warns; the few drops of cold water still work, or use 125 g of commercial ground almonds and skip the pounding.
- Folding, not beatingThe original puts the brisk beating after the whites are in; today it is better to beat at the yolk stage and fold the whisked whites through with a spatula — the puffed texture in a boiled pudding comes entirely from the eggs, as there is no raising agent.
- The basin and the clothA buttered pudding basin of about 1.5 litres, filled to within an inch of the rim rather than literally full — this mixture rises. Cover with buttered parchment and foil pleated across the middle, then tie the cloth over it; a modern steamer over simmering water for the same 90 minutes gives a lighter result than a full boil.
- Keep the water up"Boil without ceasing" means the pot must never go off the boil and never run dry. Top up with boiling water from a kettle, not cold, and keep the level at two-thirds up the basin.
- Wine sauceThe period sauce is usually a sweet wine — sherry or Madeira — thickened lightly with butter, sugar and egg yolk, or simply a sweetened wine syrup. The recipe says to turn the pudding out; serve it hot, as it firms and dries as it cools.
- YieldSix to eight as written, and rich enough that eight is realistic. "Probable cost, 2s" is the book's own late-Victorian pricing, not a guide to anything now.
Cassell's assembles boiled puddings under place-names, and Rotterdam Pudding belongs to a large Victorian family of Continental-labelled almond puddings, where the geography is often more decorative than documentary; such names generally signal a rich, egg-and-almond, un-English sweet rather than a dish traced to a particular kitchen. What is genuinely old here is the structure: a flour-and-milk panada, cooked stiff and cooled, used as the body for a great many eggs. That technique let a cook turn a modest amount of flour and butter into something that eats like a custard but holds up to an hour and a half in the copper. Almonds, pounded by hand with water to stop them oiling, were the standard richening agent before ground almonds could be bought ready-made, and the pudding was marked "rich" and priced at two shillings.