Home › The Principles of Cookery › Semolina Pudding, Baked
Semolina Pudding, Baked
Flavour a pint and a half of milk with almonds or lemon-rind. Put it into a saucepan, let it boil up, and drop into it, when boiling, three table-spoonfuls of semolina, two table-spoonfuls of sugar, and a slice of fresh butter. Stir the mixture over the fire till it thickens a little. Pour it out, let it cool, and add gradually four well-beaten eggs. Line a piedish half way down with good pastry, butter the bottom, pour in the mixture, and bake the pudding in a moderate oven. If a plain pudding is required, two eggs only need be used. Serve stewed fruit or wine sauce with the pudding. Time to bake, about half an hour, or till set. Probable cost, 1s. 3d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A milk-and-semolina custard baked in a half-lined pastry case — closer to a set custard tart than to the stodgy semolina pudding of school memory. Two details decide the result: the temperature of the semolina base when the eggs go in, and the oven.
- The hinge: cool the base firstThe instruction to "let it cool, and add gradually" is the whole recipe. Beaten eggs stirred into hot semolina will scramble into threads that no amount of baking will smooth out. Let the mixture drop to hand-warm, then add the eggs in three or four additions.
- Imperial pintCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so a pint and a half is 30 fl oz — about 3 1/2 US cups (850 ml). Three tablespoons of semolina in that much milk gives a very loose porridge; it is the eggs, not the grain, that set the pudding.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "moderate" is conventionally read today as about 350F (175C). Half an hour at that heat will just set a custard of this depth; test by giving the dish a nudge, and take it out while the centre still trembles slightly.
- SemolinaUse fine or medium semolina (durum wheat), not the coarse couscous-grade grain and not semolina flour. Rain it into the boiling milk in a thin stream while stirring or it will clump.
- Flavouring with almondsNineteenth-century cooks steeped blanched sweet almonds, sometimes with a couple of bitter almonds, in the hot milk and strained it. A tablespoon of ground almonds infused in the milk and strained out, or a few drops of almond extract, does the same work. Lemon rind should be pared in strips with no white pith and likewise strained out.
- "A slice of fresh butter"An unmeasured lump — read it as about 1 oz (30 g). "Fresh" means unsalted, as distinct from the salted keeping butter of the period.
- Lining the dish half way downThe pastry runs up only the sides, not across the base, which is buttered instead. Blind-bake the lined rim for 10 minutes at 400F before filling, or the wet custard will leave it pale and soft.
- Eggs and richnessFour eggs give a firm, rich custard; the two-egg "plain pudding" sets softly and is best eaten warm from the dish. Both feed four to five, as the original states.
- Wine saucePeriod wine sauces for puddings were commonly sweet white wine or sherry with sugar and a little butter, sometimes lightly thickened, served warm. Stewed rhubarb, plums or apricots suit it equally.
Semolina — the coarse middlings left when durum wheat is milled — reached British kitchens in quantity through the nineteenth-century grain trade and was promoted as a cheap, digestible starch for invalids, children and nurseries, alongside sago, tapioca and arrowroot. Cassell's, generally taken to have been aimed at middle-class households of modest means, gives it here in its dressed-up form: the same milk pudding lifted into a dessert with a pastry border, egg custard and a wine sauce, the sort of dish that could go to table at a modest dinner. The stated cost of 1s 3d for four or five people is given without comparison to other sweets, and the alternative two-egg version shows the book offering the same recipe at two levels of expense.