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Orange Pudding, Baked
INGREDIENTS for pudding for 4 persons. -6 oz. of stale sponge-cake or bruised ratafias, 6 oranges, 1 pint of milk, 5 eggs, 1/2 lb. of sugar.
AVERAGE COST, 1s. 6d.
Bruise the sponge-cake or ratafias into fine crumbs and pour upon them the milk, which should be boiling. Rub the rinds of 2 of the oranges on sugar, and add this, with the juice of the remainder, to the other ingredients. Beat up the eggs, stir them in, sweeten to taste, and put the mixture into a pie-dish previously lined with puffpaste. Bake for rather more than 1/2 hour turn it out of the dish, strew sifted sugar over, and serve.
TIME. Rather more than hour.
SEASONABLE from November to May.
GREDIENTS for large pudding.-4 Seville
A baked orange custard thickened with cake crumbs rather than flour, set in a pastry-lined dish. It is straightforward, but the printed entry is garbled at both ends and gives no oven heat.
- The truncated textThe entry breaks off mid-sentence into a second, larger version calling for Seville oranges. Only the four-person recipe above is complete; ignore the dangling line.
- Contradictory timingThe method says "rather more than 1/2 hour" and the TIME line says "rather more than hour". Trust the method: a pint of milk with five eggs in a pie-dish sets in about 35-45 minutes.
- Oven heatNone is given. A moderate oven, roughly 325-350F, suits a baked custard, but this is a modern inference: the entry specifies nothing. Too fierce a heat risks curdling and weeping.
- RatafiasSmall crisp almond-flavoured macaroons, close to modern Italian amaretti. Either those or stale sponge cake will do; 6 oz of crumbs is roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups, depending on how finely and dryly they are crumbled.
- Rubbing the rind on sugarNineteenth-century sugar came in hard loaves, and rubbing a whole orange over the lump stripped the zest with its oil. With granulated sugar, grate the zest of two oranges and rub it into the sugar with your fingers until damp and fragrant.
- The sugarHalf a pound is 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons, which is very sweet against a pint of milk. The instruction to "sweeten to taste" afterwards suggests Beeton expected judgement; start with two-thirds and taste before the eggs go in.
- Juice and curdlingThe juice of four oranges is acid enough to thicken the milk before baking. Add it last, off the heat, with the milk no longer boiling, and pour into the pastry at once.
- Turning it outA custard baked in puff paste in a deep pie-dish will not unmould cleanly unless the pastry is well browned underneath. Blind-bake the lining first, and if in doubt serve it from the dish and dust with sugar there.
- YieldFour generous servings, as stated; six modest ones from a standard 9-inch dish.
Orange puddings of this kind, bound with crumbs or ground almonds rather than flour, were a fixture of English cookery well before Mrs Beeton collected them, appearing in eighteenth-century manuscript and printed receipt books alongside lemon and almond puddings of the same construction. The "seasonable November to May" note is the giveaway: this is a winter dish, timed to the Seville orange, which reaches Britain from Spain in midwinter and gives the sharp, faintly bitter flavour the larger version of the recipe calls for by name. Rubbing the rind on a sugar loaf, mentioned here in passing, was the standard way to capture citrus oil in a kitchen with no fine grater, and the ratafia biscuit — a small almond macaroon sold by the confectioner — was a common shortcut for cooks who wanted body and a hint of almond without pounding nuts themselves. The one shilling and sixpence costing reflects Beeton's habit of pricing every dish for a household budgeting its way through the week.