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Rotterdam Pudding (Rich)
Beat 4 1/2 ounces of fine flour to a smooth paste with half a pint of milk, and add 4 1/2 ounces of sugar and a small pinch of salt. Blanch and pound 4 1/2 ounces of sweet almonds, and whilst pounding drop in a little cold water to keep them from oiling. Put 4 1/2 ounces of butter into a saucepan with half a pint of milk. Let it remain until the butter is melted, then stir in the paste of flour and milk, and keep stirring the mixture over the fire until it boils and becomes thick, when it may be poured out to cool. Add the blanched and pounded almonds, then stir in first the well-beaten yolks of nine eggs, and afterwards the whites of the eggs whisked till firm. Beat the pudding briskly for a few minutes, pour it into a buttered basin which it will fill, tie it in a cloth, and let it boil without ceasing until done enough. Turn it out carefully, and send wine sauce to table with it. Time to boil one hour and a half.
A boiled almond pudding built on a thick milk-and-flour panade, lightened with nine eggs. The method is closer to a steamed sponge than to anything in a pie tin, despite its place in the pastry chapter.
- The hinge: keep the water at a steady simmer"Boil without ceasing" means the basin must never stop cooking. Top up with boiling water from a kettle as it evaporates, keeping the level about two-thirds up the basin; cold water added mid-cook, or a pot boiled dry, will leave the centre raw.
- WeightsEach 4 1/2 oz measure is about 130 g: roughly 1 cup flour, 2/3 cup sugar, 9 tablespoons butter, and about 1 cup whole almonds. Half a pint of milk is 1 cup if the book is using American measure, 10 fl oz if imperial; either works, as the paste is cooked to thickness rather than to a fixed hydration.
- The almondsBlanching means pouring boiling water over shelled almonds and slipping off the skins. Ground almonds or almond flour substitute directly; if you pound or grind your own, the splash of cold water the recipe calls for keeps the friction from turning them oily and pasty.
- Sweet almonds onlyOld recipes distinguish sweet almonds from bitter almonds, which were used as flavouring and are not safe in quantity. Any almond sold for eating today is the sweet kind.
- Folding the whitesThe panade is heavy, so slacken it with the yolks first, then add the firm whites in two or three additions. Note that the recipe puts "Beat the pudding briskly for a few minutes" after the whites go in; folding gently instead will preserve more of the lift.
- Buttered basin and clothA 1 1/2 to 2 quart pudding basin, generously buttered. In place of the cloth tied round the basin, a round of buttered parchment with pleated foil over it, tied under the rim, does the same job and stays put.
- DonenessAn hour and a half is realistic for this volume. A skewer into the centre should come out clean and the pudding should feel set rather than sloshing when the basin is nudged. Let it stand five minutes before turning out or it may collapse.
- Wine saucePeriod wine sauces were generally a sweet wine such as sherry or Madeira with butter and sugar, sometimes thickened with egg yolk, served hot and poured over at table. A sabayon or a plain custard laced with sweet wine serves the same purpose.
- YieldRich enough to give eight to ten modest servings. It is best eaten the day it is made, warm.
Puddings named for a foreign city were a common conceit in nineteenth-century English and American compilations, where the label usually signalled a style rather than a documented origin -- Rotterdam here suggesting Dutch richness in butter, almonds and eggs. The underlying technique is much older than the name: a flour-and-milk paste cooked to a thick panade, then loaded with pounded almonds and enriched with a great many eggs, is the same construction that produced the boiled almond puddings of eighteenth-century receipt books. Pounded almonds did the work that ground nuts and extracts do now.