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Viennoise Pudding
Ingredients.
Five ounces of crumb of Bread.
Three ounces of Castor Sugar.
Two ounces of Candied Peel.
One ounce of Loaf Sugar.
Three ounces of Sultana Raisins.
Rind of one Lemon.
V Yolks of four Eggs.
Half a pint of Milk.
One gill of Cream.
One wineglassful of Sherry.
Cut the bread into dice, shred the candied peel, grate the lemon-rind, and pick the sultanas. Put these all into a basin with the castor sugar. The loaf sugar is to be placed in a saucepan and put on the fire to burn a dark-brown colour. Then add the milk, and let the burnt sugar dissolve in the milk. Pour this to the yolks, previously whisked, and then strain over the bread and other dry ingredients in the basin; add the cream and sherry. Pour the pudding into a well-greased mould, and set it in a saucepan to steam for an hour and a half. Serve with wine sauce.
A steamed caramel bread custard. The hinge is the burnt sugar: it must go dark enough to taste of caramel rather than syrup, but stop short of black, or the whole pudding turns bitter.
- Loaf sugar and the caramelLoaf sugar was hard refined sugar broken from a cone; ordinary granulated does the same job. Melt it dry over medium heat until it is the colour of strong tea, then draw the pan off the heat before the milk goes in.
- Adding the milkCold milk hitting hot caramel spits violently and the sugar seizes into a lump. Warm the milk first, add it a little at a time, and return the pan to low heat to dissolve the hardened caramel completely before it meets the yolks.
- MeasuresA gill is 5 fl oz (a generous half US cup); half an Imperial pint of milk is 10 fl oz. A wineglassful is taken as about 2 fl oz of sherry.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or caster sugar. Granulated will dissolve adequately here since the mixture soaks, but caster is closer to the original.
- Crumb of breadThe interior only, crusts cut away, from a plain white loaf a day or two old. Fresh bread collapses to paste rather than holding its dice.
- Let it soakThe recipe moves straight from mixing to the mould. Give the custard 20 to 30 minutes on the bread first, so no dry cubes are left to float to the top of the finished pudding.
- SteamingGrease the mould well, cover the top with buttered paper or foil, and stand it in a pan of water reaching halfway up the sides. Keep the water at a bare simmer -- a hard boil curdles an egg custard. It is done when the centre is set and reads about 175F.
- Wine saucePeriod wine sauces vary: a sweetened sherry or madeira sauce, thickened with egg yolk or a little arrowroot in some versions and simply with butter and sugar in others, served hot. A plain custard sauce works if you want less alcohol.
- YieldRoughly a 1.5-pint mould; six modest servings. Turn it out while hot, as caramel custard sticks as it cools.
In the French-derived kitchen vocabulary that English high-class cookery adopted wholesale in the later nineteenth century, à la viennoise was applied loosely to dishes said to be in the Viennese manner; what it meant in practice varied from book to book. The pudding itself belongs to a much older English family: the buttered and bread-and-butter puddings that gave household cooks a way to turn stale crumb, dried fruit and candied peel into a company dish. What marks it as "high class" rather than plain family cookery is the sherry, the cream alongside the milk, the four yolks with no whites, and the steamed mould turned out whole -- features of a well-provisioned kitchen, and of a table where the pudding arrived with a wine sauce in a separate boat.