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Puddings Made from Stale Bread and Cake: Sponge
1/2 cupful butter, Sponge Cake à la Chantilly. 1 stale sponge cake, 2 cupfuls fresh or canned fruit, 1 cupful cream, 2 tablespoonfuls powdered sugar, teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla.
From the top of a stale sponge cake cut a thin slice. Remove the inside, leaving a wall one and a half inches thick. Into this put any fresh fruit sprinkled with sugar, or canned fruit from which the bulk of the juice has been drained. Beat the cream till thick. Add the sugar and vanilla, and pour over the cake just before serving. Save the inside of the loaf; it may be utilized in various ways.
Cocoanut Sponge Pudding. 2 cupfuls scalded milk, 1½ cupfuls sponge-cake crumbs, 1 cupful grated cocoanut, 1 cupful sugar, Grating nutmeg, 1 tablespoonful rose water, 3 eggs.
Pour the hot milk over the spongecake crumbs, sugar, beaten yolks of eggs, cocoanut. Allow it to stand half an hour. Add the nutmeg, rose water, and whites of eggs beaten to a dry froth. Bake three quarters of an hour in a buttered mold. Serve with wine sauce. -MARGARET BAILEY.
Marmalade Sponge Cake. 1 stale sponge cake, 4 dry lady's fingers, 1 cupful powdered sugar, cupful butter, cupful orange marmalade. a Cut a stale sponge cake in two, in layer style, and set it in a steamer ten minutes. Make hard sauce by creaming the butter gradually, adding the sugar, and beating it till smooth and white. Add the marmalade at the last. Dry the lady's fingers in a moderate oven till light brown, then roll into crumbs with a rolling-pin. Spread the hard sauce on a layer of the cake, cover with the other half of the cake, spread with the remainder of the sauce, and scatter thickly with sifted lady's finger crumbs. Serve immediately. Almost any kind of jam can be used instead of orange marmalade. If it is a very rich, sweet preserve, use cupful less sugar. The sauce is also excellent if made with cupful orange juice beaten into the hard sauce, 1 tablespoonful lemon juice, and teaspoonful orange extract. Cream in a Crust.
Three ways with a stale sponge cake, from the days when a cake that had gone dry was a starting point rather than a loss. The printed fractions have dropped out of the text in several places, so read the quantities with care before you start.
- Missing fractionsSeveral amounts in the marmalade cake read simply "cupful butter," "cupful orange marmalade," "cupful orange juice" (and "use cupful less sugar"); a fraction has evidently dropped out in printing. For a hard sauce with 1 cup powdered sugar, something like 1/2 cup butter and 1/2 cup marmalade is a reasonable reading; with the orange-juice variant add the juice sparingly, a spoonful at a time, or the sauce will separate.
- Oven for the coconut puddingNo temperature is given at all. A moderate oven of about 325-350F suits it; three quarters of an hour at that heat should set a custard of this size. Standing the mold in a pan of hot water helps keep the edges from curdling.
- "A moderate oven" for the lady's fingersRoughly 350F. You are drying them to a pale brown, not baking them, so check them often; they colour quickly.
- Grated cocoanutAt this period this meant fresh coconut cracked and grated at home, unsweetened and quite wet. Use unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut; if you use the sweetened bagged kind, cut the sugar to about 2/3 cup.
- McIlhenny's Mexican VanillaA brand name of the period; grocers and spice houses sold many such house vanillas. Any good vanilla extract does the same work. "Mexican vanilla" has long been liable to adulteration with coumarin-bearing tonka bean, which is part of why a named brand mattered.
- Rose waterStill sold, but modern rose waters vary enormously in strength. A tablespoon of a mild culinary rose water is right; with a concentrated one, start with a teaspoon and taste the custard base before the whites go in.
- Wine sauceThe book expects you to know it: a sweet sauce of sugar and butter with wine, typically sherry or madeira, served warm. Any custard or a spoonful of cream also suits the coconut pudding.
- The whipped cream"Beat the cream till thick" means softly whipped, not stiff — it is poured over the filled cake at the table. Assemble the Chantilly cake close to serving or the fruit juices soften the walls.
- YieldNo yields are given. Each of the three will probably serve six to eight, depending on the size of the cake; a modern 8- or 9-inch sponge is about the right scale for the two that use a whole loaf.
Puddings built on stale cake belong to a long line of thrift cookery that runs from medieval sops through bread pudding and trifle, and this chapter treats them as a matter of economy rather than luxury — sponge cake staled fast in an unrefrigerated pantry, and a household that baked weekly always had some. The first recipe borrows the name of Chantilly, the French château whose kitchens are traditionally credited with sweetened whipped cream, and the hollowed-out cake filled with fruit and cream is a close cousin of the English trifle and of the charlotte. Rose water in the coconut pudding is a survival from eighteenth-century flavouring practice, when it and orange-flower water were as common as vanilla; by the time of this book it was already old-fashioned, kept alive in exactly this sort of milk-and-crumb custard. The named contributor, Margaret Bailey, reflects the compilation habit of the period, when household encyclopaedias gathered recipes from readers, domestic-science teachers and cookery columns alike.