Cake Pudding
Take a moderate sized baking-dish, around which lay small sponge cakes, split and buttered on both sides. Spread them with marmalade or preserves on the inside. Put in the centre of the dish pieces of cake buttered and spread with preserves on both sides. Leave room for a custard, to be made, seasoned and poured over the pudding before baking. Eat hot with hot sauce.--Mrs. V. R. I.
This is a nineteenth-century cabinet or bread-and-butter pudding built on sponge cake, and the recipe assumes you already know how to make a baked custard. Nearly everything that needs saying concerns the custard, which the original leaves entirely to the cook.
- The custard is the whole dishNo proportions are given. A reliable baked custard for a moderate baking dish is 3 eggs to 2 cups of milk or half-and-half, with 1/3 cup sugar, a pinch of salt and vanilla, nutmeg or a spoonful of sherry to season. Pour it over the cake and let it stand 20 minutes so the sponge drinks it up before it goes in the oven.
- Oven and donenessThe recipe gives no oven temperature or time; 325F is safer than a hotter oven, since custard set too fast curdles and weeps. Reckon on 45 to 55 minutes, until the centre still trembles slightly and a knife an inch from the middle comes out clean. A water bath is worth the trouble for an even set.
- Sponge cakes'Small sponge cakes' means individual sponges firm enough to split and butter, closest today to ladyfingers or a plain unfrosted sponge cut into fingers. Modern bakery sponge is far softer and wetter; stale it a day, or it will dissolve into the custard.
- Buttered on both sidesDo not skip this. The butter waterproofs the cut faces just enough that the slices hold their shape and the pudding turns out layered rather than sodden.
- Marmalade or preservesThe recipe leaves the choice open. Anything very loose or very sweet will thin the custard; a thick, tart preserve gives the best result.
- "Hot sauce"A poured sweet sauce served hot: typically butter and sugar creamed, then thinned with boiling water and flavoured with wine, brandy or lemon. It is not hard sauce, which is served cold and firm.
- Vessel and yieldNo size or yield is given; a 1 1/2-quart dish, 8 or 9 inches across, suits the quantities suggested above and will serve about six. Serve it within a few minutes of leaving the oven; a baked custard pudding falls and stiffens as it cools.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 ladies of Virginia and her sister states, is full of recipes signed only with initials, and this one carries the terse, assume-nothing style of a cook writing for other cooks who already knew how to make a custard. The dish belongs to the long English line of buttered puddings, of which bread-and-butter pudding is the household version and this the company version: cake instead of bread, preserves instead of currants, a sauce boat alongside.