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Apricot Pudding, Baked
INGREDIENTS for good-sized pudding.-1 dozen apricots, pint of bread-crumbs, 1 pint of milk, 3 oz. of pounded sugar, 3 eggs, 1 glass of sherry. AVERAGE COST, in full season, 1s. 6d.
Make the milk boiling hot, and pour it on to the bread-crumbs; when half cold, add the sugar, the well-whisked eggs, and the sherry. Divide the apricots in half, scald them until they are soft, and break them up with a spoon, adding a few of the kernels, which should be well pounded in a mortar; then mix the fruit and other ingredients together, put a border of paste round the dish, fill with the mixture, and bake the pudding from to hour.
TIME. to hour.
SEASONABLE in August, September, and October.
A Victorian bread-and-custard pudding built on scalded fresh apricots, but it includes an instruction that no modern cook should follow.
- The kernelsApricot kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the crushed kernel meets moisture and enzymes or digestion. "A few of the kernels, well pounded" is an unmeasured dose of a cyanogenic glycoside distributed through a pudding that will be shared out; pounding is exactly the step that maximises release. This is the same chemistry that made bitter almonds a standard nineteenth-century flavouring and a recurring cause of poisoning.
- Why baking does not fix itSome hydrogen cyanide is volatile and driven off by heat, but a pudding baked in an open paste border at custard temperatures is not a reliable way to remove it, and the amount left depends on how many kernels went in and how finely they were crushed. There is no safe way to guess the quantity from this text.
- If you want the flavourThe almond-marzipan note the kernels were there to supply belongs to almond extract or a spoonful of ground sweet almonds in a current recipe. Use a modern baked apricot pudding recipe rather than adapting this one.
- Sherry glassA Victorian wine glass in these books is roughly 2 fl oz, not a modern 5-6 oz pour.
- Bread-crumbs by volumeCrumbs were measured by the pint here, which implies loose fresh crumbs rather than dried crumbs from a packet. Dried crumbs absorb far more milk and set the pudding solid.
- "Average cost"1s. 6d. is the figure given 'in full season', and the recipe is marked seasonable in August, September and October. Out of season the same dish would have been an extravagance.
Mrs Beeton's fruit puddings sit on a single structure inherited from the eighteenth century: hot milk poured over bread-crumbs, enriched with eggs and sugar, flavoured with whatever the month provided, and baked inside a border of paste that contained and decorated the dish. The kernel is the period detail. Cookery books of the period treated the stone of apricots, peaches and plums as a source of almond flavouring, and bitter almonds themselves were sold for the same purpose; the poisonous principle was known to chemists, but instructions to pound in "a few of the kernels" continued to appear in respectable household books long after that. The tightly bounded season, August to October, is a reminder that this was fresh-fruit cookery in a country where apricots ripened on garden walls and did not travel.