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Somerset Pudding
Take a stale sponge cake and stand on a serving dish. Prepare 1 cupful or more of fresh fruit juice or the syrup from canned fruit. Baste this, a little at a time, over the cake until it is thoroughly soaked but unbroken. Make a soft custard with 1 pint of milk, 3 eggs, a pinch of salt, 3 tablespoonfuls of sugar and a suitable flavoring. When cold pour it round, not over the cake. Decorate the top with candied cherries or fresh fruit.
A trifle in all but name, and the whole thing hinges on soaking the cake slowly enough that it drinks the juice without collapsing.
- Baste, don't drownSpoon the juice on a tablespoon or two at a time, waiting for each addition to be absorbed before the next. A stale, close-grained sponge takes liquid steadily; a fresh or very airy one will slump into crumbs.
- The custard is a stirred custardA pint is 2 cups. Whisk the eggs, sugar and salt, temper in the scalded milk, then cook over low heat or a water bath, stirring constantly, until it coats a spoon — about 175F. Past 185F it scrambles.
- If it does curdlePull it off the heat immediately, strain it, and blend or whisk hard. A barely broken custard can usually be rescued; a fully scrambled one cannot.
- "A suitable flavoring"Period shorthand for vanilla, a scrape of lemon or orange zest, almond extract, or a spoonful of sherry or brandy. Match it to whichever fruit syrup you used.
- Cold means coldCool the custard with a piece of parchment on the surface to stop a skin forming, then chill it thoroughly. Warm custard poured round a soaked cake will sink it.
- Round, not over"Round, not over" -- The recipe is explicit about this, though it gives no reason: keeping the custard off the top leaves the fruit-topped cake visible, and spares the already-soaked sponge further liquid. A shallow dish with a rim works better than a deep bowl.
- Canned syrupModern canned fruit in "light syrup" or juice is thinner and less sweet than the heavy syrups of the period. Reduce it briefly if you want more body, or add a spoonful of sugar.
- YieldThe recipe does not specify a cake size; a sponge of the usual round size with a pint of custard will serve about six. Assemble no more than a few hours ahead; left overnight, the cake tends to go to paste.
This is the plain end of the English trifle family — sponge, liquid, custard, fruit on top — stripped of the layered jam, macaroons and whipped cream that a fuller Victorian trifle carried. The name attaches it loosely to the West Country, and the pudding is really a use-it-up construction: a cake gone dry, the syrup drained off a jar of fruit, three eggs and a pint of milk. Recipes of this kind, close relatives of tipsy cake and cabinet pudding, are often said to have been a household answer to stale cake in the decades before home freezers, when a sponge past its first day was a problem to be solved rather than thrown away.