Home › The Principles of Cookery › Welsh Pudding, Very Rich
Welsh Pudding, Very Rich
Rub a large lump of sugar upon the rind of a fresh lemon till all the yellow part is taken off. Crush it to powder, and add additional sugar to make up the quantity to three ounces. Melt four ounces of fresh butter very gently. Mix with it the yolks of four eggs and the whites of two, and add the sugar. Line a shallow dish with good pastry, put in the mixture, and bake till done enough. Time to bake the pudding, half to three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 2d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A rich lemon-butter tart filling baked in a pastry case — essentially a curd set in the oven rather than on the stove. The whole dish turns on how gently it is baked.
- The hinge: bake it gently and stop earlyThis is a butter-and-yolk custard with no flour to protect it, so a hot oven will curdle it into sweet scrambled egg. Bake at 325-350F and pull it when the centre still has a slight wobble; it firms as it cools.
- Rubbing sugar on the lemonBefore microplanes, dragging a lump of loaf sugar over the rind was one common way to capture the zest oils. A modern equivalent is to rub the finely grated zest of one lemon into the sugar with your fingertips and let it sit ten minutes. The recipe uses no juice at all — the flavour is pure oil of lemon.
- Quantities in gramsThree ounces of sugar is about 85g (a scant half cup); four ounces of butter is 115g, one US stick. The butter should be melted and cooled to barely warm before the yolks go in, or it will begin to cook them.
- Egg sizesVictorian eggs probably ran somewhat smaller than today's large. Four yolks and two whites from modern large eggs is close enough, but if your eggs are extra-large you may prefer three yolks and two whites.
- "A shallow dish" and the pastryRead this as a shortcrust-lined tart tin of about 8 inches, with the filling no more than half an inch deep. Blind-baking the case first at 400F for 15 minutes, then filling and lowering the heat, is a modern insurance policy; the recipe itself simply says to line the dish and put in the mixture.
- TimingHalf to three-quarters of an hour is right for a shallow case at 325-350F, but start checking at 25 minutes. Depth matters more than the clock.
- Yield and servingFour or five portions, as stated. Serve it barely warm or at room temperature; straight from the oven the butter has not set and the slice will slump.
- The cost line1s 2d is fourteen old pence, the price of the ingredients when the book was compiled. It is a period detail, not a guide to anything now.
Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery collected hundreds of these regionally-labelled puddings, and the names are often more decorative than geographical — Welsh, Sussex, Cambridge and Manchester puddings sit near one another in Victorian books without much to distinguish their origins beyond a compiler's habit of attaching a place to a formula. What this one actually is, is an oven-baked lemon curd in pastry, close kin to the lemon cheesecakes and maids of honour that English cooks had been making since the seventeenth century, when some tarts called "cheesecake" contained no cheese or curd at all, though many did. The sugar-rubbing method is the oldest thing in the recipe: rubbing a lump of loaf sugar against citrus rind to absorb the peel oils appears in English and French cookery writing long before the nineteenth century, and survives today in the barman's oleo-saccharum. Loaf sugar came in hard form and needed breaking down, and by the date of this book lump and cube sugar were sold ready broken — the recipe's own "a large lump" implies as much — so the instruction to "crush it to powder" was a matter of texture rather than of dismantling a cone.