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Vermicelli Pudding, Baked, Plain
Flavour a pint and a quarter of milk with cinnamon, lemon-rind, or grated nutmeg. Strain and boil it, and drop into it gradually when boiling a quarter of a pound of vermicelli. Stir it over the fire till it is tender and the milk is thick. It will take about a quarter of an hour. Pour it into a bowl, and beat it well with a pinch of salt and a little powdered sugar. When nearly cold add one well-whisked egg. Butter a pie-dish, pour in the pudding, and bake in a moderate oven. When it is nicely browned upon the top it is done enough. If a richer pudding is required, an additional egg or more should be put in, together with a quarter of a pint of cream and a little brandy. Time to bake the pudding, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A milk pudding built on pasta rather than rice or semolina, and it behaves like a baked custard once the egg goes in. The whole recipe hinges on one line: the egg is added when the mixture is nearly cold.
- Cool before the eggIf the thickened vermicelli is still hot when the beaten egg goes in, the egg sets in threads and the pudding bakes grainy. Let it come down to barely warm, then beat the egg in thoroughly.
- Imperial measuresA pint and a quarter is an imperial 25 fl oz, about 3 cups. The optional quarter pint of cream is 5 fl oz, roughly two-thirds of a cup. A quarter pound of vermicelli is 4 oz, or about 115 g.
- What vermicelli meantA fine wheat-flour pasta, sold in long coiled skeins in the period, not rice vermicelli. Use fine Italian vermicelli or capellini broken into short lengths; angel hair works. Rice noodles will disintegrate into starch.
- Moderate oven350F (175C). Three-quarters of an hour at that heat gives a set pudding with a browned top; check at 35 minutes, since a wide shallow dish colours faster than a deep one.
- Flavouring the milkCinnamon stick or a pared strip of lemon rind is infused in the hot milk and then strained out. Grated nutmeg cannot be strained, so if you use it, add it to the milk and simply leave it in.
- Thickening stageA quarter of an hour of stirring is right for old-style vermicelli, but modern fine pasta cooks in five to eight minutes. Stop when the strands are tender and the milk has gone to a loose porridge, or the pudding turns pasty.
- SugarNo quantity is given. Two to three tablespoons suits a plain pudding; go to four if you are serving it without a sauce or stewed fruit.
- YieldAs stated, four or five portions, in a buttered dish of at least 1.5 imperial pints (about 850 ml) capacity. Serve warm rather than hot.
Milk puddings thickened with imported Italian pasta appear in English cookery from the eighteenth century onward, sitting alongside rice, sago and tapioca in the same family of nursery and family dishes; vermicelli is Italian for "little worms", a name for the thin extruded strands that English writers adopted without translating. Cassell's places this in a run of puddings graded from plain to rich, and the structure here is characteristic of that arrangement: the basic version costs sixpence and uses one egg, while the same recipe with a second egg, cream and brandy became a dish fit for the dining room. The listed cost is a reminder that these dictionaries were written for households keeping accounts, where a pudding was chosen partly by the price of its ingredients.