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Thickened Milk Pudding
Boil one pint of milk and one-half pint of water. Thicken with one pint of flour, and stir in three ounces butter, while warm. When cold, add nine eggs (well beaten), one pound sugar, one wine-glassful wine, and powdered cinnamon and mace to your taste.--Mrs. R.
A panada pudding: a cooked flour-and-milk paste enriched with butter, eggs, sugar and wine, then baked. The original assumes you already know that last part, since it gives no dish, temperature or time.
- It has to be bakedIt has to be cooked -- nothing in the text says how. The mixture is a raw-egg batter on a flour base and must be set by heat; period puddings of this construction were baked in a dish or boiled/steamed in a buttered mould, and the recipe settles neither. If baking, a buttered two-quart dish at around 350F until puffed and set in the centre, roughly 45 minutes to an hour, is a modern suggestion rather than anything the book supplies; a water bath keeps the edges from curdling.
- A pint of flourMeasured by volume, as was usual in nineteenth-century American recipes: about 2 cups, or 8 to 9 oz. Stirred into a pint of milk and half a pint of water it gives a thick, spoonable paste rather than a stiff one -- roughly 9 oz of flour to 24 fl oz of liquid, much looser than a choux base. The flour is there to give the pudding its body.
- Wine-glassfulRoughly 2 fl oz in this period, sometimes a little more. The recipe specifies only 'wine'; Madeira, sherry or a sweet white would all suit, and brandy at half the quantity also works.
- Cool the paste before the eggs go inThe recipe says "when cold" and means it. Nine beaten eggs dropped into a hot panada scramble instantly and the pudding turns grainy. Beat the butter in while the paste is warm, then let it come down to room temperature or below.
- Nine eggs, one pound of sugarThat is a very rich, very sweet pudding by current taste -- about 2 cups of sugar. Halving the sugar gives something closer to a modern baked custard pudding and does no harm to the set, which comes from the flour and eggs.
- MaceThe outer covering of nutmeg, still sold ground and worth buying for this sort of recipe; it is warmer and less sharp than nutmeg. If you have none, use nutmeg at about two-thirds the quantity.
- Yield and servingServes ten to twelve. The recipe gives no serving directions; a wine sauce or hard sauce would suit, and it slices better after a few hours' standing.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathered recipes from some two hundred and fifty Virginia housekeepers, most credited by initial or surname as "Mrs. R." is here -- a book assembled from the manuscript receipt books of a class whose kitchens had been upended by the war. The dish itself is an old English form: a panada, usually bread soaked or boiled in milk or broth, though in this flour-based variant cooked into a stiff paste, then loosened with eggs and enriched with butter and sack or Madeira. Puddings of this construction run back through eighteenth-century English cookery well before the lighter, flourless baked custards took over, and the heavy hand with wine, sugar, cinnamon and mace is characteristic of the Chesapeake table, where imported Madeira was fashionable among the Virginia gentry.