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Polish-Pudding
Blanch 1 ounce of sweet almonds and 6 bitter ones, and pound them in a mortar to a smooth paste, adding a few drops of water to prevent their oiling. Put them into a saucepan with half a pint of new milk, and bring the liquid slowly to the boil. Mix 2 tablespoonfuls of arrowroot very smoothly with half a pint of cold milk. Pour the boiling milk upon this, and stir briskly for a minute or two. Add 2 ounces of fresh butter and 2 well-beaten eggs, and stir the mixture again until it is cool. Put it into an oiled mould, and set it upon ice, if possible; if not, lay it in a cool place until it is wanted. Turn it out before serving, and send hot plates to table with it, and the following sauce in a tureen: Beat 2 ounces of fresh butter to a cream. Add 2 ounces of powdered sugar and 2 glassfuls of sherry, and mix thoroughly. Put the mixture into a small saucepan, and stir gently until it boils. Serve immediately. Time, six or eight hours to set the pudding, if it is not put upon ice.
This is a chilled almond-arrowroot mould with a hot sherry butter sauce, and two elements in it put it out of reach of a modern kitchen: the bitter almonds and the barely-cooked eggs. The notes below explain what is wrong rather than how to patch it.
- Bitter almonds are the blocking problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the nut's own enzyme converts to hydrogen cyanide as soon as the kernel is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding with a few drops of water accomplishes. Six of them in a pudding for a few people is not a decorative trace; sale of unprocessed bitter almonds is restricted or prohibited in the United States and much of Europe for this reason.
- Why old books used them anywayBitter almonds were the standard source of almond flavour before commercial almond extract, and Victorian writers treated them as an ordinary flavouring in small numbers. That confidence reflects the period's tolerance for a known risk, not a safe margin. Use a current recipe if you want a pudding of this type.
- The eggs never reach a safe temperatureTwo beaten eggs go in after the milk has come off the heat, and the mixture is then stirred until it is cool and left to set for six to eight hours. Nothing in that sequence reliably pasteurises the egg, and the pudding then stands for hours in a rich dairy medium — the original itself treats ice as optional, directing only that it be laid in a cool place.
- "New milk" and arrowrootNew milk is fresh whole milk, unskimmed. Arrowroot was preferred over flour for invalid and dessert cookery because it sets clear and bland; it thickens fast and thins again if boiled hard. Here the hot milk is poured onto the cold slurry rather than the reverse.
- "2 glassfuls of sherry" is not a measurementA wine glass in this period is usually reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, but glassfuls in these books range widely and the author gives no guide. Anyone reading the sauce as a separate item should treat the quantity as unspecified.
- The mould and the hot platesAn oiled mould means one wiped with a neutral oil so the set pudding releases cleanly. The recipe explicitly calls for hot plates and a boiling sauce to accompany a cold pudding, so the contrast of temperatures appears to be intended.
Puddings named for countries — Polish, Swedish, German — proliferated in nineteenth-century English cookery books without much reference to the countries themselves; the label usually signalled a style rather than an origin, and the same name can cover quite different dishes from one book to the next. What marks this one as of its period is the almond paste pounded in a mortar, the arrowroot rather than flour or cornflour, and the assumption that ice is a luxury the cook may not have. The hot sherry-butter sauce belongs to a large family of Victorian dessert sauces built on creamed butter and sugar, close kin to the hard sauce still served with plum pudding, but boiled briefly so it came to the table thin and steaming.