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Semolina Pudding
Take a pint and a half of milk, when boiling drop into it three table-spoonfuls of semolina, and stir all together for about fifteen minutes; throw in two ounces of butter, and three ounces and a half of sifted sugar, with the grated rind of a lemon. Whilst the semolina still remains hot, beat gradually and briskly into it four eggs. Bake in a moderate oven. Time to bake, half an hour.
A Victorian milk pudding, closer to a baked semolina custard than the stiff nursery version. The hinge is the eggs: the semolina must be hot but not boiling when they go in, and they must go in gradually or they will scramble into threads.
- The pint is imperialCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so a pint and a half is 30 fl oz, about 850 ml. Using US pints gives 20 per cent less liquid and a much firmer pudding.
- Three tablespoonfuls is a light handThat is roughly 35-45 g of semolina to some 850 ml of milk, which sets soft and custardy rather than sliceable. If you want a pudding that holds a cut edge, work toward 75-85 g, but expect a denser result than the original intends.
- Which semolinaUse fine or medium durum semolina, sold as semolina or semolino. Coarse couscous-grade grain will not hydrate in fifteen minutes, and "semolina flour" sold for pasta behaves like flour and turns pasty.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; a moderate oven is conventionally read as about 350F / 175C. Half an hour at that heat sets a dish about 20 cm across; the centre should still wobble slightly, as it firms as it cools.
- Tempering the eggsTake the pan off the heat and let it drop below a simmer, then beat in the eggs a little at a time, whisking hard. Adding them to boiling semolina, or all at once, curdles the mixture.
- Sifted sugarSifted sugar here means sugar pounded fine and passed through a sieve; modern caster is the nearest equivalent, not icing sugar. Three and a half ounces is about 100 g, which is sweet but not cloying against the lemon.
- The lemon rindGrate only the yellow zest and add it with the butter, off the heat, so the oils are not driven off during the fifteen minutes of stirring.
- Dish and yieldButter a 1.5-litre baking dish; the mixture comes well up the sides and rises a little. Serves four to six, warm or at room temperature, with stewed fruit or jam.
Semolina is the coarse middling left when durum wheat is milled, and the English name comes through the Italian semolino, a diminutive of semola, bran or meal. Cassell's places this among the milk puddings that dominated late Victorian family and nursery cookery, a family that also took in rice, sago, tapioca and ground rice: cheap starch, plentiful milk, and an oven that was already lit. What lifts this particular version out of the nursery is the treatment, which is essentially that of a baked custard, four eggs beaten into an enriched, buttered, lemon-scented base rather than grain simply swollen in milk and browned. Recipes of this kind travelled easily because the ingredients were reliable and inexpensive, and semolina puddings remained a fixture of British institutional and school catering well into the twentieth century, which is largely why later generations remember them with less affection than the Victorians did.