Ratafia Pudding
INGREDIENTS for large pudding.- quart of milk, 4 eggs, lb. of ratafias, loaf sugar and flavouring of almonds to taste. AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Well beat the eggs, and add them to the milk, with sugar and almond flavouring to taste. Pour into a pie-dish, and on the top drop the ratafias, right side upwards, till the top is covered. Bake in a good oven for 1/2 hour.
TIME.- hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A baked custard with almond macaroons floated on top. The printed text has lost several of its fractions, so read the quantities with care before scaling.
- Missing fractionsMissing figures -- The ingredient list as printed reads "quart of milk" and "lb. of ratafias", and the time line reads simply "hour" — in the original setting these carried figures (a numeral before "quart", fractions before "lb." and before "hour") that have dropped out of the text. A quart (40 fl oz Imperial, about 4 3/4 US cups) of milk to 4 eggs is a thin custard; a number of Victorian baked custards use more eggs to the pint. Treat the ratafia quantity as however many biscuits cover the surface, which for a standard pie-dish is roughly 4 oz.
- RatafiasSmall, hard almond macaroons about the size of a large coin, sold by the bag in Victorian grocers and still available in Italian and British shops as amaretti or ratafia biscuits. They are not the same as the ratafia cordial. Sound almond macaroons are the nearest substitute.
- Almond flavouringPeriod "essence of almonds" was based on bitter almond and was used a drop at a time. Modern almond extract is potent; a quarter teaspoon for a quart of milk is ample, and the ratafias themselves already carry almond.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar broken from a cone and would have been crushed before use. Ordinary granulated sugar is the equivalent; for a quart of milk, 2 to 3 oz suits a custard eaten with the sweet biscuits on top.
- A good ovenThis means a well-heated one; Beeton gives no temperatures, so any modern figure is only an approximation — somewhere in the region of 325-350F suits a custard of this size. The half hour given is short for a full quart — expect 45 minutes to an hour, and judge by the centre being just set with a slight wobble rather than by the clock.
- The hingeCustard that boils curdles. A dish of water in the oven, or standing the pie-dish in a roasting tin of hot water, keeps the edges from setting hard before the middle has caught up.
- Placing the biscuits"Right side upwards" means domed side up. Drop them on once the custard has been poured and leave them; they soften into the surface as it bakes and form a lid. Adding them partway through baking leaves them sitting on a skin instead.
- YieldA quart of milk with four eggs needs a pie-dish of rather more than 2 pints, and serves six to eight. Beeton gives the average cost as 1s. for the large pudding.
Ratafia was originally a flavoured cordial — the word is generally traced to French usage for a liqueur drunk to ratify a bargain — and by the eighteenth century the name had transferred to the little almond biscuits served alongside it, and then to the almond flavouring itself. Beeton's book treats ratafias as a store-cupboard staple: they turn up crushed into trifles, and here simply scattered whole over a plain baked custard, which is about as economical as a sweet course gets. The dish belongs to the large family of plain, economical Victorian sweets that made four eggs and a quart of milk feed a table, and its listing as "seasonable at any time" is the point — unlike fruit puddings, it depended on nothing that came and went with the year.