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Walnut Pudding
16 walnuts. 1 oz. (1 heaping table-. I oz. (I heaping tablespoonful) butter 1 teaspoonful almond extract ½ teaspoonful vanilla extract Pinch salt 2 heaping tablespoonfuls browned bread crumbs 1 pint (2 cups) milk 3 eggs Blanch the walnuts, then chop them finely, and mix with the bread crumbs; put them into a fireproof dish with the milk, and allow to boil up; then simmer for ten minutes.
Remove from the fire, and when cool stir in the yolks of the eggs one by one, add the salt, extracts, and the sugar; mix thoroughly. Beat up the whites to a stiff froth, and fold them in gently.
Bake for half an hour in a moderate oven.
A baked nut custard, thickened with breadcrumbs rather than flour. The printed ingredient list has come down to us incomplete, so read the notes on quantities before you start.
- Missing quantitiesThe list gives no weight for the walnuts and no amount for the sugar, though both are called for in the method. For a pint of milk and three eggs, a scant cup of walnuts and about 1/3 cup of sugar sit within the normal range for puddings of this type, but the original figures are genuinely lost rather than merely archaic.
- The butterAn ounce of butter is listed and never mentioned again in the instructions. The likeliest reading is that it was meant for greasing the dish before the mixture goes in; use it to butter the casserole generously.
- Fireproof dishA flameproof earthenware or glass casserole that could go directly over the burner and then into the oven; the recipe assumes as much, since the milk and nuts boil in the same dish. Most modern ceramic bakeware cannot do this. Scald the milk and nuts in a saucepan and transfer to a buttered baking dish.
- Moderate oven350F. A custard set with only three eggs to a pint of milk will weep and curdle if pushed hotter; standing the dish in a pan of hot water is the usual insurance and costs nothing.
- Blanching walnutsWalnuts are blanched here to loosen the papery brown skin, which is astringent. Pour boiling water over them, let them stand a few minutes, and rub what will come away off in a towel; unlike almonds, walnut skins seldom slip off cleanly. Skipping the step is common now; the pudding is darker and slightly astringent as a result.
- Browned bread crumbsDry crumbs from stale bread, toasted in the oven until fawn-coloured. They are the only starch thickener in the dish, the eggs doing the rest of the setting, so they should be fine and evenly dried.
- Tempering the yolksThe instruction to cool the milk before adding the yolks is the hinge. Stirring raw yolks into near-boiling milk scrambles them and no amount of beating recovers the texture.
- Almond extractA full teaspoon is assertive by current taste. Half that amount lets the walnut through.
- Yield and servingServes four to six. It comes out somewhere between a bread pudding and a souffle, and falls a little on cooling; serve warm with cream or a thin custard sauce.
Marion Harris Neil wrote for a moment when the fireproof earthenware dish was being promoted to American households as a labour-saver: one vessel that went from the burner to the oven to the table, saving washing-up in kitchens with little or no household help. Puddings like this one sit at the tail of a much older English tradition of breadcrumb custards, where stale bread rather than flour or cornstarch did the thickening and nothing was wasted.