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Swiss Pudding
Cream half a cup of butter and add gradually seven-eighths of a cup of flour.
Scald in two cups of milk the grated rind of one lemon, pour over the first mixture and cook five minutes in the double boiler. Beat the yolks of five eggs till thick and lemon colored, gradually add one-third of a cup of powdered sugar, add to the cooked mixture and cool. Fold in the whites of the eggs beaten to a stiff froth. Turn into a buttered mold, cover, and steam one and a quarter hours. While steaming be sure that the water surrounds the mold to half its depth.
This is a steamed soufflé pudding: a thick milk-and-flour panade lightened with beaten eggs and set slowly in a covered mold. The hinge is the folding — the whites are the only leavening, so the batter must stay airy from bowl to steamer.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this period "powdered sugar" means fine granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-laced confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closest match.
- The butter and flourHalf a cup of butter is 4 oz / 115 g; seven-eighths of a cup of flour is roughly 4 oz / 110 g. Creaming them together rather than cooking a roux lets the paste disperse into the hot milk without lumping.
- ScaldingScalded milk is heated to roughly 180F, when it steams and a ring of bubbles forms at the edge. It should not boil. Steep the lemon rind in it as it heats.
- Five minutes in the double boilerThat is enough to cook out the raw flour taste and thicken the base to a stiff paste that pulls from the sides. Stir throughout, or the bottom sets in sheets.
- Cool before the yolks and whites"Add to the cooked mixture and cool" matters: if the base is still hot when the whites go in, they deflate and the pudding steams into a dense pancake. Let it come to warm-to-the-touch.
- The moldA 1½–2 quart pudding basin or charlotte mold, buttered and filled no more than two-thirds — this rises considerably. Cover tightly with a lid, or with buttered parchment and foil tied down, so condensation does not drip into the batter.
- SteamingSet the mold on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to halfway up the sides as directed, and keep it at a bare simmer for the full 1¼ hours, topping up with boiling water as needed. Let the pudding rest 10 minutes before unmolding.
- Yield and servingServes about six. The recipe specifies no sauce, though puddings of this type were commonly sent to table with one — a lemon or vanilla hard sauce, or a thin custard poured around it.
Steamed puddings built on a cooked flour-and-milk panade sit halfway between a soufflé and a bread pudding, and English and American cookbooks of the late nineteenth century carried many of them under national or place names — Swiss, German, Cabinet, Newmarket — that generally say little about actual origin and a good deal about the era's habit of dressing a familiar preparation in a foreign label. What distinguishes this one from the heavier suet puddings of the same period is that it contains no suet, no breadcrumbs and no dried fruit: it is lightened entirely by five beaten egg whites. The steamed mold suited such batters because a water bath holds close to the boiling point and will not scorch a delicate egg mixture, at a time when domestic oven temperatures were hard to control.