Nella Bergen
ANGEL PUDDING
1 pound English walnuts shelled 1 1/4 cups powdered sugar Whites of five eggs 3 teaspoons Royal baking powder 9 ounces of dates stoned
This is an ingredient list rather than a set of instructions, and the printed heading has collapsed two separate entries together. What follows is what the list will and will not tell you.
- Two recipes, one line"BERRY MUFFINS ANGEL PUDDING" reads as two headings run together: the ingredients listed (egg whites, nuts, dates, no flour and no berries) cannot make muffins, so a berry muffin recipe appears to have been lost or displaced in the printing. Precisely what went wrong on the page cannot be recovered from this line alone.
- No method survivesThe page gives quantities only. Any reconstruction is guesswork: whites beaten stiff, sugar beaten in, baking powder with chopped nuts and dates folded through, then baked in a shallow buttered dish would suit these ingredients, but the book says none of it.
- The sugar quantity is broken"1/4 cups powdered sugar" cannot be right against five egg whites and a pound of nuts, and a dropped whole number is the likely explanation. The original as printed gives no more than this, and the figure should not be guessed at silently.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this date "powdered sugar" usually means a fine granulated sugar rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold under that name now. Superfine or caster sugar is the closer match and dissolves properly into beaten whites.
- Royal baking powderA brand name; Royal was a cream-of-tartar powder. Any modern double-acting baking powder works, and three teaspoons is a heavy hand by current standards. Whether the brand is named through advertising interest or simple household habit cannot be told from the book.
- English walnutsSimply the common walnut, as against the American black walnut. A pound shelled is roughly four cups — a very nut-dense pudding, closer to a torte than a custard.
- DatesNine ounces stoned is about a cup and a half chopped. Dates of the period were drier than the soft Medjools now sold; if using very moist fruit, expect a wetter set.
- Oven and yieldThe list gives no oven, timing, yield or accompaniment, and none can be read off it. A moderate oven and a shallow dish would suit these ingredients, but the temperature, the baking time, the number of servings and anything served alongside come from the modern reader, not from the source.
Celebrated Actor Folks' Cookeries belongs to a genre of charity and promotional cookbook in which stage names, rather than kitchen authority, sold the volume. Nella Bergen was a comic-opera soprano of the Broadway of the 1890s and 1900s, best remembered now for her association with the De Wolf Hopper company, and the contribution attributed to her is a fair sample of what such books contain -- a family favourite jotted down as a list, with the method taken for granted. The name "angel pudding" is traditionally explained, as with angel food cake, by the pale, light result of a batter raised on stiffly beaten whites, though that connection is folk explanation rather than documented derivation. Date-and-walnut puddings of this kind appear in other collections of the period under a variety of names.