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Vanilla Essence (Grate the chocolate)
Grate the chocolate and dissolve it in the milk.
Cream the sugar and butter, and add the yolks of eggs one by one, then half the chocolate and half the breadcrumbs. Mix these and add the rest of chocolate and breadcrumbs. Whip up the whites of eggs very stiffly and shake them in also. Turn into a well-greased fancy mould and steam one hour and a half. Serve with German sauce round.
A steamed chocolate breadcrumb pudding, printed here without its ingredient list — the quantities belonged to a heading that has been lost, and the title "Vanilla Essence" is a stray from the neighbouring entry. The method is complete and workable, but you supply the proportions.
- The missing quantitiesNothing in the text tells you how much chocolate, milk, sugar, butter, breadcrumbs or how many eggs. Puddings of this type in the same period run to roughly 3 oz chocolate, 4-5 tablespoons milk, 3 oz each butter and caster sugar, 3 oz fine dry breadcrumbs and 4 eggs — treat that as a reconstruction, not the author's figures.
- The hingeEverything depends on folding the stiff whites in last and gently. The batter is heavy with butter and crumbs, and the only lift comes from that air; beat it in and the pudding steams into a dense brick.
- "Dissolve it in the milk"Grated block chocolate will not truly dissolve. Warm it with the milk over low heat, stirring to a smooth thick paste, then cool it to blood heat before it meets the creamed butter, or the butter will slacken and split.
- The chocolate itselfVictorian and Edwardian "chocolate" sold in cakes for grating was often sweetened, and its cocoa content varied and was not necessarily comparable to modern dark chocolate. Around 50 per cent cocoa solids is a reasonable modern stand-in; expect to adjust the sugar down if you go darker.
- BreadcrumbsFine dry white crumbs, not fresh soft ones and not commercial dried breadcrumbs, which are too coarse and too salty. They absorb the milk and give the pudding its close, tender crumb.
- Mould and steamingGrease a fancy mould of about 1.5 to 2 pints well and fill it no more than three-quarters. Cover with greased paper or foil tied down, stand on a trivet in a pan with boiling water halfway up, and keep it at a bare simmer, topping up as needed. An hour and a half suits a mould of that size; a skewer should come out clean.
- German sauceIn British cookery of this date the name applied to a sweet pudding is usually taken to mean a Weinschaum or sabayon -- egg yolks, sugar and a white wine or sherry whisked over hot water until thick and foaming. It is served warm and must not be allowed to boil or the yolks curdle.
- YieldSix modest servings. Turn out while hot, since the pudding sets firmly in the mould as it cools.
Steamed puddings bound with breadcrumbs rather than flour were the refined end of a very old English habit of using stale bread as the body of a sweet dish; the crumbs give a lighter, shorter texture than suet and flour, which is why they turn up so often in the "high class" and hotel cookery manuals written for households with a trained cook. Chocolate reached this position late — until block eating chocolate became cheap and reliable in the second half of the nineteenth century, a cook grated whatever cake of sweetened chocolate the grocer stocked, which is exactly what this recipe assumes. The German sauce poured round the base rather than over the top is a mark of professional service of the period, when a sabayon of yolks, sugar and wine was one of the accompaniments served with a moulded hot pudding.