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Egg Pudding
2 ozs. (1/4 cup) sugar 2 ozs. (1/2 cup) flour 2 ozs. (1/4 cup) butter 1 pint (2 cups) boiling milk 3 tablespoonfuls cold milk ½ teaspoonful vanilla extract Cream sauce Mix the sugar and the flour with the cold milk, stir them into the boiling milk, and cook until thick and very smooth; remove from the fire and add the butter. Beat in the yolks of the eggs, the extract, and mix in gently the whites of the eggs stiffly beaten. Turn into a buttered fireproof dish and bake for about thirty-five minutes. Serve hot with cream sauce.
To make the sauce: Beat half a cupful of butter with one cupful of powdered sugar, then add two tablespoonfuls of cream and half a teaspoonful of vanilla extract. 5 eggs
This is a baked egg pudding built on a thick pastry-cream base, lightened with beaten whites — closer to a soufflé than to a custard. The ingredient list is scrambled in the original: the five eggs appear at the very end, and the "cream sauce" listed among the ingredients is the hard sauce given in the final line.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirThe base must be cooled to warm before the yolks go in, and the stiffly beaten whites folded in with a light hand. Stirring them through knocks out the air and gives a dense, wet pudding instead of a risen one.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350F, for the stated thirty-five minutes suits a dish of this depth. It is done when the centre is puffed and just set with a slight wobble.
- Weights and cupsThe doubled measures are the author's own and are reliable: 2 oz sugar is 1/4 cup, 2 oz flour about 1/2 cup, 2 oz butter 1/4 cup (half a stick). A pint here is the US pint, 2 cups.
- "Fireproof dish"This means glazed earthenware or heatproof glass — a baking dish, not a lidded stew pot. A buttered 1½-quart dish, with headroom left for the rise, suits the quantity.
- Cook the base properlyThe flour needs a couple of minutes at a simmer after it thickens or the pudding tastes pasty. "Very smooth" is the standard; whisk rather than stir, and sieve if lumps form.
- The sauce is a hard sauceBeaten butter and powdered sugar with cream and vanilla, served uncooked. It is meant to melt over the hot pudding, so make it in advance and keep it cool and firm. Half a cup of butter to a cup of sugar is very rich; halving the batch is reasonable.
- Serve at onceLike any soufflé-type pudding it begins to sink within a few minutes of leaving the oven. Have the table ready. It serves five to six.
Fireproof earthenware and, a little later, heat-resistant glass bakeware made it possible to cook and serve in the same vessel, and cookery writing of the period took up the idea with enthusiasm. Egg pudding of this kind belongs to an older lineage still: a thickened milk-and-flour base with folded whites is essentially the cooked flour-and-milk base behind the classic soufflé, adapted for the plain nursery and supper puddings that filled the back pages of Victorian and Edwardian household manuals. The accompanying "cream sauce" is what is more often called hard sauce, or, when made with spirits, brandy butter; here it is made without spirits and flavoured only with vanilla, which by 1900 was widely sold ready-bottled as an extract rather than infused from the pod at home.