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Queen's Pudding
8 Savoy finger biscuits 1/2 pint sweet sauce 3 tablespoons raspberry jam Roll the biscuits to make rather fine crumbs, and spread them over the bottom of a small pudding dish. Make the white sweet sauce according to recipe, and pour it over the biscuit crumbs while hot. Now spread the raspberry jam over the sauce. Put the pudding in a hot oven for five minutes, and serve at once.
A five-minute assembly job that depends entirely on the sauce being thick and hot when it goes in. Read the sauce first, since the original assumes you already have that recipe to hand.
- Savoy finger biscuitsThese are sponge fingers — ladyfingers, boudoir biscuits, savoiardi. Eight of them come to somewhere around 2 to 3 oz depending on size, giving roughly a cup of fine crumbs. Stale plain sponge cake or trimmed Madeira works if you cannot find them.
- The half pintIf the book is British, half a pint is 10 fl oz (about 1 1/4 cups); an American half pint is 8 fl oz. Either fills a small pudding dish, but the British measure gives a wetter result, so err downward the first time.
- "White sweet sauce"Typically a milk (sometimes water) sauce thickened with flour or cornflour and sweetened, often flavoured with vanilla or lemon — generally neither a custard nor cream, though you should check the book's own sauce recipe. It needs to be thick enough to sit on the crumbs rather than sink through them, so cook it to the consistency of pouring custard at least.
- Pour it hotThe recipe is explicit that the sauce goes on while hot, which helps soften and bind the crumbs into a layer; a cooler sauce is less likely to soak in evenly.
- A hot ovenRoughly 400-450F by modern equivalents; the book gives no figure. Five minutes at that heat sets the surface and loosens the jam without cooking anything further. The dish is already edible going in; the oven is a finishing step.
- The jam layerWarm or beat the raspberry jam slack before spreading, or you will drag the soft sauce out of place. Three tablespoons is a thin coat, which is correct — this is not a jam tart.
- Yield and servingA small pudding dish of this makes only a few servings. Serve immediately, as directed; the layers will not hold apart for long.
- Missing meringueThe familiar Queen of Puddings is finished with a whipped-egg-white meringue browned in the oven. This version has none, so do not expect a peaked top — the five minutes is not long enough to colour anything.
Queen of Puddings, or Queen's Pudding, is generally traced to the English nursery-and-schoolroom tradition of using up stale bread or sponge with milk, jam and eggs, and by the late nineteenth century it was a fixture in household manuals in dozens of slightly different forms. The version here is a short-cut: bought sponge fingers instead of breadcrumbs, a flour-thickened white sauce instead of a baked custard, and no meringue at all. A milk-and-jam pudding of this kind was both permissible for households keeping Lent or Friday abstinence and cheap. The reliance on a cross-reference to "the recipe" for sweet sauce is typical of the period.