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Wyvern Puddings
Make a good batter of flour, milk, and eggs some two or three hours before the puddings are required. Grease some patty-pans, pour a little of the batter into each, and bake in a quick oven. Turn the puddings out of the tins, put a little jam upon each one, and serve.
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A batter pudding baked in individual tins and finished with jam — essentially small sweet Yorkshire puddings. The original gives no quantities, so the useful work is in the proportions and the oven.
- The hinge: a hot tinGreasing the tins is in the original; heating them until the fat is hot before the batter goes in is later Yorkshire-pudding practice, and helps the batter climb the sides rather than set flat.
- Quick oven425-450F. Anything lower and the puddings will not puff; do not open the door for the first fifteen minutes.
- Proportions, since none are givenA workable batter is 1 cup flour, 1 cup milk, 2 eggs and a pinch of salt, which fills about a dozen patty-pan cups. Sweeten only lightly, if at all, since the jam does that work.
- Patty-pansSmall shallow tartlet tins, roughly the size of a modern muffin cup but not as deep. A 12-hole muffin tin works; fill each about a third full.
- Why the batter restsThe two or three hours let the flour hydrate fully and the gluten relax, which gives a smoother rise and a more tender crumb. Overnight in the fridge is fine; whisk again before pouring.
- Jam goes on lastThe jam is spooned onto the turned-out puddings off the heat. Baked in, it burns at this temperature and weighs the batter down.
- Timing and yieldAbout 15-20 minutes for tins this size, until well risen and deep gold. Twelve small puddings, serving four to six, and they collapse quickly — send them to the table straight from the oven.
"Wyvern" was the pen name of Colonel Arthur Robert Kenney-Herbert, a British cavalry officer in India whose Culinary Jottings for Madras and later cookery writing were widely read in late-Victorian Britain; he wrote for households running a kitchen at a distance from Europe, and a dish carrying his name need not have been a claim of his invention. The pudding itself is domestic English rather than Anglo-Indian: a plain flour-milk-egg batter of the Yorkshire pudding family, baked in small tins so it puffs and hollows, then filled. Sweet batter puddings of this kind were a way of turning three cheap staples into a hot pudding at short notice, and the instruction to make the batter hours ahead reflects the older belief — since borne out by how flour behaves — that a rested batter rises better than a freshly mixed one.