Home › The Principles of Cookery › Saratoga Pudding
Saratoga Pudding
Put a pinch of salt into two table-spoonfuls of flour, add three table-spoonfuls of sugar, and work the whole into a smooth paste by beating it briskly with three fresh eggs. Add gradually a quart of hot milk, pour the batter into a buttered dish, and bake in a quick oven. Time to bake, about twenty minutes. Probable cost, 9d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A thin baked egg-and-milk batter, closer to a custard than to a sponge. Everything depends on how the hot milk meets the eggs.
- Temper the milk in slowlyThe hinge of the dish: three eggs beaten with only two tablespoons of flour will scramble if a quart of hot milk hits them at once. Add the milk in a thin stream while whisking hard, and use milk that is scalded rather than boiling.
- A quart, imperialCassell's quart is 40 fl oz, about 1.14 litres, not the 32 fl oz US quart. With only two tablespoons of flour, that gives a very loose batter that sets mainly on the egg.
- "A quick oven"Generally taken to mean somewhere around 400-450F (200-230C) in period usage. That is hot for a custard batter; the edges will puff and brown well before the centre sets. Baking nearer 375-400F and giving it a little longer produces a smoother set, and a roasting tin of hot water under the dish helps further.
- The dishButter a shallow ovenproof dish of about 2 quarts capacity. A deep one will still be liquid in the middle at twenty minutes; shallow and wide is what makes the stated time plausible.
- Judging it doneThe pudding should be set at the edge with a faint wobble at the centre, and a knife inserted an inch from the rim should come out clean. It carries on firming as it cools, so pull it before the middle is solid.
- Sugar and flavourThree tablespoons of sugar across a quart of milk is barely sweet by modern taste. Nutmeg grated over the top before baking, or a strip of lemon peel steeped in the milk and removed, is entirely in keeping with the book.
- Serving and costFive or six portions, best eaten warm rather than hot, with stewed fruit or jam. The "probable cost, 9d" is Victorian pence, one of the standing features of Cassell's entries rather than a measurement.
Cassell's ran a long list of puddings named for places, people and hotels, and Saratoga Pudding is often associated with the fashion for American resort names that also gave the kitchen Saratoga chips, after the spa town of Saratoga Springs, New York, then at the height of its reputation among wealthy travellers e though the derivation is folk association rather than documented fact. The name is decorative rather than descriptive: the pudding itself is a plain batter custard of the kind English cooks had been baking for generations, arguably a distant relation of the batter that goes under roast beef, enriched with sugar and baked in its own dish, at a cost of ninepence.