Home › Sweets › Angelica and Glacé Cherries
Angelica and Glacé Cherries
Blanch the almonds, peel and shred them finely, and put them on a baking-tin, and bake them to a fawn colour in a slow oven.
Butter a plain Charlotte mould, sprinkle the inside with shredded almonds, and fill up with small pieces of sponge cake or Genoese cakecrumbs.
Half a pint of strong Coffee. Half a gill of Cream. Sponge Cakes or Genoese Cake. One ounce of Sweet Almonds. Half an ounce of Butter. Three tablespoonfuls of Apricot Marmalade. Two tablespoonfuls of Maraschino. Dissolve the sugar in the coffee, let it cool, beat the eggs and add them to the cream and the maraschino liquor; mix them thoroughly, and strain into the mould. Put the remainder of the shredded almonds on the top, cover the mould with a piece of buttered paper, and stand it in a stewpan with enough boiling water to come half up the mould.
Steam it for about two hours. Let it cool, and when set turn it out on a round dish.
Warm up the marmalade with a little water , and sugar, strain it, and mask the pudding with it. Ornament the top and sides with little strips of angelica and glacé cherries cut in half. Keep it on the ice until it is required for table.
A steamed coffee-and-maraschino custard set in a lined mould, glazed and decorated — the title names only the garnish, which tells you how much Victorian cooks cared about the finish. The printed text gives no quantities, so treat it as a method to lay over a custard recipe you already trust.
- No ingredient listThe recipe names almonds, sugar, coffee, eggs, cream, maraschino, sponge or Genoese crumbs and marmalade but gives no amounts. A workable baked-custard ratio is roughly 4 whole eggs (or 3 eggs plus 2 yolks) to a pint of liquid; scale to the capacity of your mould.
- The hinge: gentle heatThe original says boiling water, but a custard set over water is better kept below a boil, at a bare shiver (around 170-180F), or the eggs curdle and the turned-out pudding weeps. Two hours suits that gentler heat; check at 90 minutes for a set that wobbles as one piece.
- Slow oven for the almondsSomewhere around 275-300F. Shredded blanched almonds colour fast once they start; "fawn" is pale tan, not brown, and they will darken a little off the heat.
- Charlotte mould and stewpanA plain Charlotte mould is a straight-sided, slightly tapered tin, typically somewhere between a pint and a half and two pints. Any deep, smooth-sided mould or souffle dish works. "Stewpan" here just means a wide, deep saucepan with a lid to hold the water bath.
- Genoese cakeGenoese (genoise) is a whisked whole-egg sponge, firmer and less sweet than modern sponge cake. Day-old plain sponge or trimmed pound cake stands in; it should be dry enough to absorb custard without collapsing.
- Marmalade means apricotIn Victorian pastry work "marmalade" for masking a pudding commonly means apricot jam, thinned, warmed and sieved into a glaze. Orange marmalade will fight the coffee.
- MaraschinoThe original is a dry, clear cherry-stone liqueur, not the sweet syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. A tablespoon or two is enough to read against the coffee.
- AngelicaCandied stems of Angelica archangelica, sold in strips and now a specialist item. Candied citron peel or thin strips of candied lime peel can stand in for the decorative strips, though neither matches angelica's green.
- Keep it on the iceRefrigerate. The pudding needs several hours cold to set firmly enough to unmould and glaze, and being an egg-and-cream sweet it should stay under 40F until served. Yield depends entirely on the size of the mould.
This belongs to the family of moulded, steamed cabinet and diplomat puddings that filled the sweet course of late-Victorian dinners: sponge crumbs bound with a rich egg custard, turned out, glazed with apricot, and finished with the standard confectioner's palette of green angelica and red glace cherries. Angelica itself is the candied stem of a tall umbellifer long grown in northern Europe, associated particularly with Niort in western France, and by the 1880s it was widely sold by grocers as a decorating material rather than a flavouring. Flavouring the custard with coffee and maraschino places the dish in the French-influenced repertoire that English cookery schools of the period taught to servants of well-off households, which is exactly the audience a book titled High-Class Cookery Recipes was written for. The instruction to keep the finished pudding "on the ice" is a reminder of the cold storage such a kitchen relied on, whether an icebox stocked with cut natural ice or, in larger households, an ice-house or cold larder.