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Caromel Pudding
Cream together one cupful of butter, and one of sugar. Add five eggs (yolks and whites beaten separately) and one cupful of preserved damsons, removing the seed. Beat all together very light and season with a teaspoonful vanilla. Bake on pastry.--Mrs. A.D.
This is a chess-pie style filling — essentially a rich butter-and-egg custard carried by fruit — baked in a pastry shell rather than a dish. The original assumes you know that, and gives no oven heat or time.
- "Bake on pastry"Line a 9-inch pie plate with unbaked short crust and pour the filling in; the mixture is loose and needs the pastry as its vessel. One recipe fills a single deep 9-inch shell, or two shallow ones.
- Oven heatStart at 425F for about 10 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 325F and bake until the centre is just barely wobbly, roughly 35-45 minutes. High heat throughout will curdle a filling this eggy and this buttery.
- Preserved damsonsDamson plums put up in heavy syrup, a standard Virginia pantry item. Drain them well and chop coarsely; a wet cupful will thin the custard past setting. Italian prune plums in syrup, or a thick damson jam thinned with a little chopped fresh plum, stand in reasonably.
- Removing the seedDamsons were often preserved whole, stones in, which is why the instruction is needed at all. Pit them before measuring the cupful, or you will lose volume to the stones.
- A cupful of butterHalf a pound, two sticks. That is not an error — this style of pudding is deliberately very rich, and the butter must be genuinely soft before creaming or the eggs will not incorporate.
- Yolks and whites separatelyCream the butter and sugar, beat in the yolks, fold the fruit and vanilla through, then fold in the stiffly beaten whites last. "Beat all together very light" applies to the base, not to the whites once they are in.
- ServingCut in small wedges; eight to ten portions from a 9-inch pie. Serve at room temperature — warm from the oven it will not have set enough to slice cleanly.
Despite the name, nothing here is caramelised: "caromel" is a variant spelling of caramel, though no sugar is browned in this receipt, and the damson preserve alone would have given the pudding its colour and depth. The form belongs to the large Southern family of transparent, chess and butter puddings — sugar, butter and a great many eggs baked in a crust — which let a household turn a jar of last summer's preserves into a company dessert. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathered contributions from named Virginia housekeepers, and "Mrs. A. D." writes as they all do: for someone who already owns the pastry recipe, knows her own stove, and needs only the proportions.