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Yam Pudding
Take a white yam, and either boil or roast it; then pare off the skin, and pound the tuber very fine with three-quarters of a pound of butter, half a pound of sugar, a little mace, cinnamon, and twelve eggs, leaving out half the whites; beat the whole with a little rose-water. Put in a little citron cut small, and bake it in a moderate oven.
A rich baked pudding in the old West Indian manner, closer to a sweet potato pie filling than to a steamed English pudding. The recipe gives no yam weight, which is the one figure a modern cook has to supply.
- What "white yam" meansThis is true yam, Dioscorea — the barky, starchy tuber sold in Caribbean, West African and Latin American groceries, often as name blanco or ñame. It is not the orange "yam" of American supermarkets, which is a sweet potato and will give a much wetter, sweeter pudding.
- The missing quantityNo yam weight is stated. Against three-quarters of a pound of butter, half a pound of sugar and twelve eggs, roughly 2 lb of cooked, peeled tuber gives a batter that holds together; less and it is a custard, more and it turns pasty. Judge by consistency: it should drop heavily from the spoon.
- The eggs"Twelve eggs, leaving out half the whites" means twelve yolks and six whites. Period eggs were often smaller than today's large ones, so ten yolks and five large whites may be nearer the mark.
- Pound it while hotYam goes gluey when it cools and is worked. Mash or rice it straight from the pot or the oven, beat the butter in while the flesh is still steaming, and add the eggs only once the mixture has dropped below scalding so they do not scramble.
- Moderate oven350F/175C. In a buttered dish two to three inches deep, reckon 50 to 70 minutes, until set at the edges with a faint tremble at the centre.
- Rose-water and mace"A little rose-water" probably means a teaspoon or two; modern rose-waters vary greatly in strength, so add half and taste. Mace is the outer coat of nutmeg — warmer and less sharp than nutmeg itself, and worth buying rather than substituting.
- CitronCandied citron peel, the pale green-white kind sold at Christmas. Chop it fine and toss it in a spoonful of the sugar so it does not sink to the bottom of the dish.
- YieldAs written this is a large pudding — twelve to fourteen servings. It is very rich; serve in small portions, warm rather than hot, and it keeps well refrigerated for three or four days.
Yam puddings belong to the Anglo-Caribbean kitchen, where the true yam — carried from West Africa into the Atlantic plantations and long a staple there — was treated as English cooks treated potatoes and carrots: boiled, pounded with butter, sugar and eggs, and baked into a sweet pudding. The heavy use of eggs, rose-water and candied citron is the older seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English idiom, and it is often said to have lingered in colonial cookery after home cooks in Britain had moved on. If it does belong to Cassell's, its appearance there would reflect the way late-Victorian household dictionaries swept up dishes from across the empire; whether the compilers expected many London readers to lay hands on a white yam is another question.