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Fun Pudding
1/2 pound ratafias 2 ounces sugar 3 ounces flour 1 1/2 pints milk 3 ounces grated cocoanut Add the sugar to a little of the milk; sprinkle in the flour, very slowly stirring all the time, add the rest of the milk, and put into a clean saucepan on the fire, and stir well until it thickens, being careful not to let it burn. Put the ratafias into a glass dish, and pour the mixture over; when nearly cold sprinkle with the cocoanut on top, and serve cold.
A flour-thickened milk pudding poured over almond biscuits — essentially a trifle built on blancmange rather than custard. Two ingredients need translating before you start.
- RatafiasSmall, hard almond macaroons, sold in Britain as ratafia biscuits and in Italy as amaretti (the crisp kind, not the soft). Half a pound is about 225 g. Italian amaretti are the closest thing on a supermarket shelf; plain almond macaroons or even amaretti-style biscotti crumbled coarsely will do.
- The measurement of milkIf the book is British, 1 1/2 pints is 30 fl oz, about 850 ml; if American, 24 fl oz, about 710 ml. Either works, but the smaller quantity sets noticeably firmer with 3 ounces of flour. Start with the larger and judge by how it coats the spoon.
- The hinge: slake the flour coldThree ounces of flour (about 3/4 cup) will seize into lumps if it meets hot milk. Mix it to a smooth thin cream with the sugar and a little cold milk first, exactly as written, then let the rest down gradually. A whisk is more forgiving than the spoon the original assumes.
- Cook the flour outThickening happens quickly, but raw flour tastes pasty. Once it comes to a bare simmer, keep it moving over low heat for a further 8 to 10 minutes. A heavy pan and a heatproof spatula that reaches the corners prevent the scorching the recipe warns against.
- Grated cocoanutThis may mean fresh grated coconut, though by this period desiccated coconut was widely sold and often called simply 'grated cocoanut'. Unsweetened desiccated coconut, 3 ounces or roughly 1 cup, works; toasting it lightly in a dry pan gives it back some of the character lost in drying. Sweetened flaked coconut will make the dish cloying, since the pudding is already sweetened.
- Assembly and settingPour the hot mixture over the biscuits so they soften and partly dissolve into it. Add the coconut when the surface is barely warm, not hot, or it sinks. Chill at least 3 hours, covered, so the flour fully sets; press cling film to the surface if you dislike a skin.
- YieldServes six to eight in a glass bowl. It does not keep well past a day — the biscuits go uniformly soggy and the flour pudding stiffens and weeps.
Flour-thickened milk puddings of this kind are the plain domestic descendants of blancmange, which in the eighteenth century was set with isinglass or gelatine and by the late nineteenth was more often stiffened with cornflour, arrowroot or ordinary wheat flour — much cheaper, and reliable in a kitchen without a cool larder. Ratafia biscuits take their name from ratafia, the almond-and-fruit-stone flavoured cordial, and were a common trifle-lining biscuit in British cookery through the nineteenth century. The origin of the name 'Fun Pudding' is not documented.