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SAUCER PUDDING (suitable for a child or invalid)
Mix a tea-spoonful of flour to a smooth paste with a little cold milk, and stir into this as much boiling milk as will make up the quantity to a tea-cupful. Let the liquor cool, then add a well-beaten egg and a little sugar and flavouring. Pour the preparation into a large buttered saucer, and bake in a well-heated oven. When done enough, turn the pudding upon a plate, and serve with jam, or with a little sherry if preferred. Time to bake, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 3d. Sufficient for one person.
A single-portion baked custard thickened with a little flour so it sets softly and is less likely to curdle. Two things decide whether it works: the vessel and the oven heat.
- A teacupfulConventionally reckoned at about 5-6 fl oz (roughly 2/3 to 3/4 cup), smaller than the half-pint breakfast cup. Mix the teaspoon of flour with a tablespoon of cold milk, then add hot milk up to that total.
- "A well-heated oven"A fierce oven will scramble an egg custard, so treat this as a moderate oven, somewhere around 325-350F. The custard is done when the centre is just set and trembles as a single mass; the recipe allows twenty minutes.
- The saucerA "large saucer" here is a shallow, wide, ovenproof dish holding about 3/4 cup — the shallowness is what lets it cook through in twenty minutes. A single ramekin works but is deeper, so allow longer and check the middle. Stand the dish in a roasting tin of hot water if your oven runs uneven.
- FlavouringUnspecified in the original. Options that suit it: a few drops of vanilla or lemon essence, a scrape of nutmeg over the top, or a strip of lemon peel steeped in the hot milk and removed. Sugar of a teaspoon or two is enough for one serving.
- Turning outA flour-set custard will unmould, but only if it is fully set and slightly cooled — five minutes out of the oven, then loosen the edge and invert. Straight from the oven it slumps.
- The sherryOffered as an alternative to jam in a period when fortified wine was standard sickroom medicine. Not appropriate for the child half of the title; the jam is.
- Yield and costOne portion, as stated. The 3d is period retail pricing; cost is given as a matter of course throughout the book.
Invalid cookery was a distinct department of the Victorian kitchen, and Cassell's, like Mrs Beeton and the nursing manuals of the same decades, gave it its own small recipes: beef tea, gruel, arrowroot, whey, and custards like this one. The logic was dietetic as it was then understood — eggs and milk were "light" and strengthening, while anything highly seasoned or fried was thought to burden a weak stomach. The saucer is the point of the title: households cooking for one patient did not want to heat a large pudding basin, and a tea saucer or a small pie plate gave a portion that baked in twenty minutes and could be carried upstairs on a tray. The flour is a stabiliser rather than a thickener in any real quantity, insurance against the custard separating in an oven with no thermostat, and the same trick survives in modern pastry cream.