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Spanish Pudding
Cut half a dozen penny spongecakes into thin slices lengthwise. Butter a pie-dish rather thickly, sift powdered sugar on the butter, and line the inside of the dish evenly and neatly with the slices. Press them with the hand to keep them in position. Afterwards fill the dish with alternate layers of sliced spongecake and apricot jam, and pour into it as much sherry or Marsala as the cakes will absorb. Beat four eggs briskly, pour them over the pudding, and bake it in a slow oven. When it is set, take it out, let it cool, and turn it out carefully. Have ready the whites of the eggs beaten to a firm froth, pile them on the pudding, and sprinkle a little powdered sugar over the froth. Put it in the oven to set the egg, and serve the pudding with custard-sauce poured round it. Time to bake the pudding, from fifteen to twenty minutes. Probable cost, exclusive of the wine, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for half a dozen persons.
A baked cabinet-pudding in the trifle family, lined with sponge and turned out. Two things in the Victorian text need sorting before you begin: the eggs, and what a penny spongecake actually was.
- The egg contradictionThe recipe says to beat four eggs and pour them over, then later asks for "the whites of the eggs" for the meringue. As written the whites are already in the pudding. The sense of the dish is four yolks (plus perhaps one whole egg) beaten with the soaked sponge, and the four whites reserved for the topping.
- Penny spongecakesSmall individual sponge cakes sold singly by bakers, roughly the size of a modern trifle sponge or a large boudoir biscuit. Six trifle sponges, or about 6 oz of any plain sponge cake cut into slices, is the equivalent.
- Slow oven300F/150C. The pudding is an egg custard bound by cake and will curdle or weep at anything brisk. Fifteen to twenty minutes at that heat suits a shallow pie-dish; a deeper one needs longer, and it is set when the centre barely trembles.
- Pie-dishA sloping-sided ovenproof dish, not a pastry tin. The slope is what lets the pudding turn out. Butter thickly and dust with sugar as directed.
- How much wineNo quantity is given because it depends on the cake. Pour in sherry or Marsala until the sponge is damp through but not swimming: roughly 4 to 6 fl oz for six sponges. Too much and the custard will not set.
- Setting the meringueAn unsweetened white froth with only a dusting of sugar on top is fragile and browns fast. A few minutes in a hot oven colours it without collapsing the cooled pudding beneath.
- Custard-sauceA pouring custard, not the set kind: milk, sugar and yolks stirred over low heat until it coats a spoon. Cassell's assumes the reader knows it, hence the bare mention.
- Yield and costSix servings, as stated. The 1s. 6d. is the ingredient cost at the time of publication, exclusive of the wine as the recipe says, and is given because the book was sold to housekeepers working to a budget.
Puddings called "Spanish" in Victorian cookery books are usually said to take the name from sherry, the Spanish fortified wine that arrived in British kitchens in enormous quantity through the Jerez trade; the alternative here, Marsala, is its Sicilian counterpart and does the same work. Structurally this is a cousin of the trifle and of cabinet or Chancellor's pudding, all of them ways of turning stale or shop-bought sponge, jam and eggs into a company dish without pastry-making. Penny spongecakes are a marker of their moment: commercial bakers were by then selling small cakes cheaply, and a middle-class kitchen might well buy rather than bake them, and Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for exactly that household, appears to make use of them more than once. The meringue lid and the ring of custard-sauce seem to have been a common finish for anything turned out of a mould.