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Cabinet Pudding
Thickly butter a melon mold; sprinkle bottom and sides with mixed nut meats, raisins, currants and chopped citron. Fill the mold loosely with small pieces of stale cake, sprinkling more fruit through it. Make a raw custard with 3 eggs, 1 tablespoonful of sugar, a pinch of salt and 1 pint of milk. Pour this over the cake, lifting now and then with a fork that the custard may be equally absorbed. Stand in a kettle of boiling water, cover closely and steam for an hour.
Serve with a wine or foamy sauce.
A steamed bread-and-butter pudding in disguise, built to use up cake that has gone dry. The technique is unfussy but the heat is not: this is a custard, and it wants a gentle simmer.
- The hinge: steam, do not boil hardKeep the water at a bare simmer and the pot covered. A rolling boil drives the mold above custard-setting temperature and the pudding turns grainy and weeps.
- The moldA "melon mold" is a deep fluted or oval tin; sizes vary, commonly somewhere between one and two quarts. A ceramic pudding basin, a metal charlotte mold, or a straight-sided souffle dish all work. Butter it heavily so the fruit sticks to the sides and releases cleanly.
- Setting up the steamerStand the mold on a rack or folded towel in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, cover the mold itself with buttered foil or a lid, then cover the pot. Top up with boiling water if it drops.
- "Raw custard"This only means the egg, sugar, milk and salt are whisked together uncooked rather than cooked to a stirred custard first. Nothing is served raw; the hour of steaming sets it through.
- Why so little sugarOne tablespoon for a pint of milk looks stingy, but the cake, raisins, currants and citron carry the sweetness. Adding more will make the pudding cloying and slacken the set.
- Soaking mattersLet the filled mold stand 15 to 20 minutes before steaming, lifting with a fork as directed. Dry cake that has not drunk the custard leaves hard pockets.
- CitronCandied citron peel is now a specialty item, mostly seen at Christmas. Candied orange or lemon peel substitutes directly, measure for measure.
- Doneness and unmoldingAfter an hour a thin knife into the center should come out clean; an instant-read thermometer should show about 175-180F. Rest the mold 10 minutes before inverting, or the pudding slumps.
- The saucesA wine sauce is usually butter, sugar and sherry or Madeira warmed together, though versions vary; a foamy sauce is egg, sugar and butter beaten over hot water until it holds air. Both are cooked, and both are generally served warm.
- YieldA 2-quart mold serves six to eight.
Cabinet pudding is one of the great English thrift desserts, securely attested in mid-nineteenth-century English cookbooks and also sold under the grander names Chancellor's pudding and diplomat pudding, the last of which survives in France as pouding diplomate. The origin of the name is generally traced to the cabinet or Chancellor's table rather than to any particular cook, and no single inventor is documented. What makes it worth its place in a low-cost cookbook is the structure: stale sponge or pound cake, a handful of dried fruit, three eggs and a pint of milk build a molded dessert that looks like a set piece and costs almost nothing. Before home refrigeration, cake dried out fast, and puddings like this one are often said to have been a common route by which last week's baking reappeared at the table.