Home › Baked Puddings › Caramel Pudding
Caramel Pudding
1/2 pint brown sugar, 1/2 pint water, 1/4 box gelatine, whites of 4 eggs, 1/2 teaspoonful of vanilla. Soak gelatine in 1 gill of cold water for 2 hours. Put sugar and other gill of water in a saucepan. Set on the fire and boil until it becomes a white syrup. Add gelatine and vanilla and beat again to a boiling point. Beat the whites to a stiff froth. Pour hot syrup over eggs, beating constantly until cold. Pour into moulds to cool.
Despite its place among the baked puddings, nothing here goes into an oven: this is a molded gelatine-and-meringue sponge, closer to what later books call a snow pudding or a Spanish cream.
- The measuresA gill is half a cup, so 1/2 pint of water is two gills \between the gelatine the syrup exactly as the method describes. Brown sugar measured by the half pint is one cup, lightly packed.
- How much gelatinePeriod boxes of granulated gelatine varied in size, so "1/4 box" is genuinely ambiguous: probably somewhere between one and two of today's 1/4-ounce envelopes. One envelope gives a soft, spoonable set; two gives a pudding firm enough to unmold cleanly.
- "A white syrup"Brown sugar will not turn white; the phrase most likely means the syrup has boiled down and clouded to opacity. The book gives no temperature, but a soft-ball syrup (roughly 238-240F) is what this style of meringue normally requires; under-boiled syrup will not stiffen the whites as well.
- The hingePour the syrup into the whites in a thin steady stream against the side of the bowl, never onto the beaters, and keep beating until the bowl is cool to the hand. Dumped in all at once, hot syrup cooks the whites into threads instead of inflating them.
- Reheating with the gelatineOnce the softened gelatine goes in, bring the syrup back just to a boil and no further. Prolonged boiling weakens gelatine's setting power, and the vanilla will cook off.
- Raw egg whiteHot syrup raises the whites considerably but does not reliably pasteurize them. If serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurized egg whites.
- Molding and yieldRinse the molds with cold water before filling so the pudding releases. Chill at least four hours, preferably overnight. This makes roughly a quart \b four to six servings.
- ServingThe original stops at the mold. A thin custard sauce, cold cream, or a spoonful of true caramel poured over would not be out of place, though the recipe itself calls for nothing.
Caramel here appears to mean burnt or browned sugar flavour rather than the chewy candy -- nothing in the method is actually caramelized, and the brown sugar is doing that work. The dish belongs to the late-Victorian vogue for gelatine desserts, which followed the arrival of granulated gelatine sold in boxes; before that, cooks boiled calves' feet or isinglass for hours to get the same effect. Whipping a boiling syrup into stiff whites is the technique now known as Italian meringue; combined with gelatine it produces the light, spongy molded puddings that fill the "snow pudding" and "sponge" pages of compilations like this one. Why it should be filed under Baked Puddings, when nothing here is baked, is unclear.