German Pudding
INGREDIENTS for pudding for 4 or 5 persons. -2 teaspoonfuls of flour, 1 teaspoonful of arrowroot, 1 pint of milk, 2 oz. of butter, sugar to taste, the rind of 1/2 lemon, 4 eggs, 3 tablespoonfuls of brandy. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 3d.
Boil the milk with the lemon-rind until well flavoured; then strain it, and mix with it the flour, arrowroot, butter and sugar. Boil these ingredients for a few minutes, keeping them well stirred; then take them off the fire and mix with them the eggs, yolks and whites, beaten separately and added separately. Boil some sugar to candy; line an oiled mould with this, put in the brandy, then the mixture; tie down with a cloth, and boil for rather more than 1 hour. When turned out, the brandy and sugar make a nice sauce.
TIME. Rather more than 1 hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A boiled custard pudding set in a caramel-lined mould — closer to a crème caramel than to anything baked. The whole thing turns on the eggs never being allowed to boil once they are in.
- The hinge: no heat after the eggsThe hinge: the eggs go in off the fire -- The flour-and-arrowroot base is cooked first; Beeton says only to take it off the fire before the beaten yolks and whites go in. A near-boiling mixture can curdle them, though the starch in the base gives some protection, so let the pan cool a little before mixing the eggs in.
- Imperial measuresBeeton's pint is the imperial 20 fl oz, about 2 1/2 US cups of milk. Her tablespoon is probably a little larger than the modern one, so three of brandy is roughly 45-55 ml.
- "Boil some sugar to candy"This means cooking sugar with a little water to a pale amber caramel, around 340-350F, and swirling it around the warmed mould to coat the inside before it sets. Beeton says to oil the mould first; a light film of neutral oil is enough, and the caramel will still release.
- Arrowroot behaviourArrowroot thickens fast and thins if overcooked or boiled hard. Bring the milk mixture just to a simmer, stir until it coats the spoon, and stop — "a few minutes" is generous.
- How it is actually cooked"Boil for rather more than 1 hour" most likely means the covered mould set in a pan of boiling water rather than the mixture boiling freely; water reaching two-thirds up the sides works well. Keep it at a bare simmer and top it up with boiling water so it never runs dry; a steamer does the same job.
- Cloth versus foilThe cloth tied over the mould kept water and condensation out; Beeton does not say to flour it. Buttered parchment under foil, pleated to allow rise and tied with string, is the modern equivalent.
- Separated eggsBeating whites and yolks apart and adding them separately lightens the set. Fold the whites in last with a light hand; overworking here loses the point of the step.
- Turning outLet it stand five to ten minutes off the heat, then invert onto a rimmed dish — the caramel and brandy will have loosened into a thin sauce that runs everywhere otherwise. Serves four to five as written.
Victorian cookbooks used national labels loosely, and "German pudding" in Beeton signals a Continental technique rather than a specific regional dish: a caramel-lined mould, a custard lightened with separately beaten whites, and a brandy sauce that forms itself in the bottom of the mould. It shares the caramel-lined mould with a crème caramel, but the flour and arrowroot make it a starch-thickened pudding rather than a set custard, and it is boiled in the British manner instead of baked in a water bath. Arrowroot, imported from the West Indies and heavily marketed through the nineteenth century as a delicate, easily digested starch, appears constantly in Beeton's puddings and invalid cookery; here it does the work that cornflour would do today. The average cost of 1s. 3d. is one of the features that distinguished the Book of Household Management — a household could see the price of the dish before committing to it.