French Pudding

What survives here is the ingredient list rather than the method, so read it as a shopping list for a lined, baked custard in the charlotte family. A few of the measures need translating before anything else makes sense.

• The missing methodNo procedure is printed with this list. The proportions are consistent with a pastry-cream base: flour and butter worked with the cold milk, then the boiling milk, with lemon rind and eggs. How the pastry, lady fingers, jam and fruit juice were meant to be assembled is not stated, and the whipped cream and nuts are presumably a finish. Work from a modern charlotte or cabinet-pudding recipe for timings.
• A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. The original helpfully glosses it, as it does the pint, which in this book is the American 16 fl oz pint rather than the imperial 20.
• "Heaping tablespoonful (1 oz.)"Trust the ounce, not the spoon. One ounce of butter is 2 level tablespoons and one ounce of sugar about 2 tablespoons, but an ounce of flour is closer to a quarter cup — far more than any tablespoon holds, heaped or not. Weigh all three.
• Oven heatNo oven or baking is mentioned in the text. If the filling is baked as an egg custard of this richness, a moderate oven of 325-350F is the usual modern range; hotter and the eggs curdle and weep.
• Lady fingersSold now as savoiardi or sponge fingers. The dry Italian kind hold up to the jam and custard; the soft supermarket sort collapse into paste.
• Fruit juiceListed without any quantity, and without a stated use. Moistening the lady fingers is the likeliest purpose, in which case a few tablespoons brushed on would be enough.
• Whipped creamNote the ambiguity: 'I pint (2 cups) whipped cream' may mean a pint measured after whipping rather than a pint of liquid cream, which would roughly double. Either way it is a generous covering, and cream will not hold on a warm pudding.