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Savoy Pudding
Rub six ounces of stale savoy cake to crumbs, and pour upon these a quarter of a pint of boiling milk. Let them soak for half an hour, then beat the mixture with a fork till smooth, and add four ounces of fresh butter, four ounces of finely-shredded candied peel, the well-beaten yolks of four eggs, two table-spoonfuls of sugar, and two table-spoonfuls of brandy. Beat the mixture for some minutes, put it into a cool place for an hour, and beat it up again. Put it into a buttered dish, and bake in a brisk oven. Whisk the whites of the eggs till firm, sweeten them, and flavour them pleasantly. Put them on the pudding, and place this in the oven a few minutes longer. When the eggs are set the pudding is ready for serving. Time to bake the pudding, half an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 9d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A stale-cake pudding of the kind Victorian kitchens used to redeem yesterday's sponge, finished with a baked meringue. The two things to get right are the cake and the oven.
- Savoy cakeSavoy cake (biscuit de Savoie) is a very light whisked sponge raised entirely on eggs, dry and slightly crisp. Any plain sponge, madeira cake or ladyfingers will stand in; avoid oil-based or heavily iced modern cake, which turns the mixture greasy and sweet.
- A quarter of a pintIn an English book of this date that is 5 fl oz, about two-thirds of a US cup. Six ounces of dry crumbs will absorb it completely.
- A brisk ovenGenerally read as somewhere around 400F, though the term is approximate. The pudding bakes half an hour, then goes back in only long enough to colour and set the meringue, three to five minutes at the same heat, or a little longer at a lower heat if the top is browning too fast.
- Butter and eggsFour ounces of butter beaten into a warm crumb paste needs to be soft, not melted, or it may separate out. The hour in a cool place firms it again, and the second beating should help keep the baked pudding light rather than solid.
- Candied peelFour ounces is a great deal by modern taste and dominates the dish. Two ounces of good mixed peel, shredded fine, is a safer quantity for modern palates; supermarket diced peel is often coarse and dry and benefits from a soak in the brandy first.
- Flavour the whites "pleasantly"The instruction is deliberately open. Whisk the four whites to firm peaks with about 2 oz caster sugar and add a little grated lemon zest, vanilla or a spoonful of the brandy.
- Dish and yieldUse a buttered 1 to 1.5 quart baking dish, shallow enough that the meringue has a broad surface. As stated, it serves four or five, hot from the oven; the meringue weeps if it stands.
- The cost line1s. 9d. is the price in pre-decimal British money and is only useful now as a signal that this was a middling, not a luxury, pudding.
Savoy cake takes its name from the House of Savoy, and the light egg-raised sponge is traditionally said to have been made for the Savoyard court in the fourteenth century, though the story is repeated far more often than it is documented; what is certain is that by the nineteenth century biscuit de Savoie was a standard European sponge, baked in a tall fluted mould. Cassell's belongs to a generation of household dictionaries that treated stale cake, stale bread and stale biscuit as raw materials rather than waste, and the crumb-and-hot-milk method here is the same principle behind bread pudding, cabinet pudding and diplomat pudding. The addition of brandy, candied peel and a separately whisked meringue lid lifts it out of the nursery and into the range of a dinner sweet, which is roughly where a shilling and ninepence for five people would have placed it in a middle-class Victorian household.