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Cuban Pudding
- Crumble a pound of sponge cake with half a pound of grated cocoanut, pour over this a pint of rich cream previously sweetened with loaf sugar and brought to the boiling point. Cover the basin and when the cream is soaked up stir in four well beaten eggs. Butter a pudding mold and arrange four ounces of preserved ginger around it, pour in the pudding carefully and steam for an hour and a half, serve with the syrup from the ginger, which should be warmed and poured over the pudding just before it is served.-Eleanor Marchant.
A steamed custard pudding built on stale sponge cake, in the Victorian style where cake crumb replaces flour. Nothing here is difficult, but the steaming and the mold need attention.
- Weights and volumesA pound of sponge cake is roughly 8 cups of loose crumb; use a plain, dry sponge or day-old pound cake, not a filled layer cake. A pint of cream is 2 cups, and "rich" here means heavy cream.
- Loaf sugarLoaf or lump sugar was refined cane sold in cones or cut cubes. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute; the original gives no quantity, but about 1/3 cup dissolved in the hot cream suits the sweetness of the ginger syrup that follows.
- CocoanutThe original means fresh coconut grated from the shell, which is moist and only faintly sweet. Packaged sweetened flake is much drier and sugarier; frozen grated coconut or unsweetened desiccated coconut soaked briefly in a little of the warm cream comes closer.
- Do not boil the eggsThe cream must be soaked up and the mixture cooled to warm before the beaten eggs go in, or they will scramble. Steam gives gentle, even heat, which lets the custard set smoothly.
- The moldA 2-quart pudding basin or steamed-pudding mold, buttered heavily, is right. Press the preserved ginger pieces against the sides so they stay put, cover the mold with buttered parchment and foil tied down, and set it on a rack in a covered pot with water halfway up the sides.
- Steaming timeAn hour and a half at a steady simmer is accurate for this size. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates; a pot that runs dry will scorch the base and split the custard. The pudding is done when a skewer comes out clean and the centre reads about 175F.
- Preserved gingerFour ounces of stem ginger in syrup, sold in jars, is what is wanted, not crystallised ginger rolled in sugar. Slice it thin. Warm the jar syrup with a spoonful of water to loosen it before serving.
- Turning out and yieldLet the pudding stand 10 minutes before inverting, or it will slump. Serves 8 to 10; the coconut and cream make it considerably richer than the volume suggests.
Puddings named for distant places were a staple of late nineteenth-century American cookbooks, and "Cuban" here probably signals the ingredients rather than any Cuban origin: coconut, and by extension the sugar-and-tropics trade that brought it north. Grated fresh coconut became more widely available in the United States in the later 1800s as shipping from the Caribbean improved, and it turns up often in the dessert chapters of the period, frequently paired with cream and cake crumbs. The method itself is thoroughly English: a steamed cake-crumb pudding of the sort that used up stale sponge, lined with something ornamental so it would look handsome when turned out. The preserved ginger points at another import line, the Chinese stem ginger in syrup that grocers stocked in stoneware jars. The signature here marks this as a contributor's submission rather than a test-kitchen formula.