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Semolina Pudding, Steamed
Take a pint of milk, and flavour it with pounded bitter almonds. Strain, and put it into a saucepan, and mix with it three ounces of scmolina, six or eight ratafias, a pinch of salt, three table-spoonfuls of sugar, and a good slice of butter. Stir the mixture over the fire till it thickens and leaves the sides of the saucepan. Pour it out, let it cool, and stir briskly into it six well-whisked eggs. Butter a plain mould rather thickly, fill it with the preparation, cover it closely, and steam until done enough. Let it stand two or three minutes. Turn the pudding out carefully, pour stewed fruit or sweet sauce round it, and send a little more to table on a separate dish. The saucepan must be closely covered, and a continuous supply of steam kept round the pudding, that it may be thoroughly cooked. Time to steam, one hour. Probable cost, 1s. 8d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A steamed semolina custard of the kind that carried Victorian dinners to their close — but its flavouring is the problem. The notes below explain the terms and the hazard rather than offering a working method.
- Bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernels are crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding them into milk does. They are not sold for food in the United States and are restricted elsewhere; the quantity here is unmeasured, so the dose is unknowable. Use a current recipe if you want a steamed semolina pudding.
- Ratafias compound the issueRatafia biscuits were small macaroons traditionally made with a proportion of bitter almond or apricot kernel, and were used precisely to reinforce that flavour. Six or eight of them alongside the infused milk means the same compound arriving from two directions.
- Not the same as almond extractModern almond essence and extract are made from benzaldehyde, either synthesised or distilled and purified from kernels, with the cyanogenic material removed. The flavour is a descendant of this recipe; the ingredient is not.
- SemolinaCoarse durum wheat middlings, the same product still sold under that name. Three ounces to a pint of milk is roughly 85 g to 570 ml — a stiff porridge that pulls from the pan sides before the eggs go in.
- A pint here is imperialThe book is British, so a pint is 20 fl oz, about 570 ml, not the American 16.
- "Steam until done enough"The instruction that the pan be closely covered and the steam continuous is the real technique: a six-egg custard set in a mould relies on gentle, unbroken heat, and a pan that boils dry or runs cool gives a pudding that either curdles or slumps on turning out.
- Cost and yieldThe book prices the pudding at 1s. 8d. and gives four or five servings, which is consistent with a pint of milk and six eggs.
Steamed moulded puddings thickened with a farinaceous grain — semolina, sago, tapioca, ground rice — were the workhorse sweet course of the late Victorian dinner table, cheap in materials, forgiving of a cook's attention, and impressive when turned out whole with stewed fruit poured round. Bitter almond was a common way to give such a pudding the perfumed, marzipan-like note that plain milk and wheat could not supply, and ratafia biscuits, traditionally said to be named after the almond-flavoured cordial, were one convenient way of delivering it. Nineteenth-century cookery writers used bitter almonds freely and a few warned about quantity, though the presence of prussic acid in them was recognised well before the end of the century, amygdalin having been isolated in the 1830s; the shift to purified benzaldehyde essences over the following decades removed the hazard while keeping the flavour, which is why the taste survives in modern kitchens and the ingredient does not.