Home › The Principles of Cookery › Yule Pudding
Yule Pudding
A quarter of a pound of butter; ten ounces of loaf sugar; the juice of two large lemons, with the rinds grated; one ounce of isinglass--the quantity, after it is dissolved, should be a large tea-cupful; and two spoonfuls of fine flour are required. Put these ingredients into a stewpan, stir over a slow fire till the preparation nearly boils, then throw it into a basin and stir till almost cold; next add eight eggs, four whites, and half a wine-glass of brandy. A puff-paste is to be put entirely over a dish, and the pudding is to be baked half an hour.
Z
A rich baked lemon custard set in pastry, closer to a lemon cheesecake or Chess pie than to a boiled Christmas pudding. Two things need decoding before you start: the isinglass and the egg count.
- IsinglassDried sturgeon swim bladder, sold in shreds or sheets and dissolved in hot water to make a clear setting liquid. Leaf or powdered gelatine does the same job; the instruction that matters is the one given — dissolve the ounce in just enough water to yield a large teacupful, a measure that varied in period usage between roughly 5 and 8 fl oz, so you are adding a strong concentrate rather than watering down the custard.
- The eggs"Eight eggs, four whites" is the period shorthand for eight yolks plus four whites, the other four whites being discarded or kept for something else. Read literally as twelve eggs' worth of material it would overwhelm the quantities of butter and sugar here.
- Loaf sugarTen ounces broken from a refined sugar loaf; ordinary granulated or caster sugar is the direct equivalent by weight. No need to pound it, since it dissolves in the pan.
- Nearly boilsThe mixture is to be brought only to the point where it steams and thickens slightly, short of a boil, as the recipe directs. Stirring it cool in the basin before the eggs go in stops them scrambling.
- Two spoonfuls of fine flourGenuinely ambiguous. A tablespoon each is the usual reading for a pudding of this size, giving roughly an ounce, but the original does not specify and a teaspoon measure is not impossible.
- StewpanA straight-sided saucepan, not a casserole dish. Use a heavy-based pan so the slow fire can be managed as low heat.
- Oven and pastryPuff paste "entirely over a dish" most likely means lining the dish and bringing the pastry up over the rim, though the wording does not rule out a covering crust. The original specifies no oven temperature, only the half-hour; puff paste generally wants a hot oven, and at a low one the pastry will go sodden before the filling firms.
- Doneness and yieldDoneness -- The centre should still wobble slightly when the dish is moved; it firms as it cools, helped by the isinglass. The original states no yield.
Cassell's collected contributions from readers and correspondents, and the bare initial "Z" at the end suggests this may be one of them rather than a house recipe. The name is seasonal rather than descriptive — there is nothing here of the dark, suet-and-dried-fruit Christmas pudding; it is a lemon custard in pastry of the kind English cookery had been making since the eighteenth century under names like lemon cheesecake, lemon pudding or transparent pudding, brightened with brandy and eight yolks for a feast table. The isinglass is the period detail. Before commercially processed gelatine became cheap and reliable in the later nineteenth century, cooks bought isinglass, prepared from the swim bladders of sturgeon and much of it imported from Russia, and dissolved it themselves; it was the standard setting agent for jellies, creams and blancmanges, and quality varied a good deal between suppliers.