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Transparent Pudding
INGREDIENTS for pudding for 6 persons. -6 eggs, 1/2 1/2 lb. of pounded sugar 6 oz. of butter, grated TREACLE PUDDING, nutmeg or lemon flavouring, puff paste.
AVERAGE COST, 1s. 2d.
Beat the eggs well, and mix with the other ingredients in a stewpan. Line a dish with puff-paste, pour in the mixture, and bake in a moderate oven.
TIME.-About 20 minutes to bake the pudding.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A Victorian custard tart: eggs, sugar and butter thickened gently, then baked in a puff-paste case until just set. The whole thing hinges on the stewpan stage, which the terse wording rather glosses over.
- The hinge: thicken, do not scrambleMixing the beaten eggs, sugar and butter "in a stewpan" is normally read as warming them over low heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture coats the spoon, though the wording as printed here does not say so outright. It must never approach a simmer or you will have sweet scrambled egg with no way back.
- Moderate ovenRead that as 350F/180C. The 20 minutes is realistic only for a shallow tart; the filling is done when the centre has a slight wobble and no more.
- Blind-bake the casePuff paste under a wet custard goes sodden. Line the dish, chill it, and bake it empty with weights at 400F/200C before the filling goes in, or use shortcrust, which is more forgiving here.
- Pounded sugarLoaf sugar crushed fine, the equivalent of caster sugar. Half a pound is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons; at that level the pudding is properly sweet by Victorian standards and you may want to cut it back.
- Butter quantitySix ounces (170 g) to six eggs is a very rich set. Melt it and add it gradually to the warm egg mixture so it emulsifies rather than pooling on the surface.
- Nutmeg or lemonGrate the nutmeg fresh; pre-ground has almost none of the volatile oil that carries the flavour. For the lemon version, rub the zest into the sugar first rather than adding juice, which can curdle the eggs.
- YieldSix as written, in a dish of roughly 8-9 inches. It sets firmer as it cools and is best served barely warm or at room temperature.
"Transparent" pudding is generally said to name the look of the finished filling rather than any ingredient: a plain egg-and-butter custard, cooked without milk or flour. Recipes under that name appear well before Beeton, in Elizabeth Raffald (1769) and her contemporaries, usually enriched with a great deal of butter and often baked in a paste case or served with candied peel. Its survival into the Book of Household Management shows how much of the Victorian sweet repertoire was inherited whole from Georgian cookery, and priced to the penny for a middle-class kitchen; the cost is given as one shilling and twopence for six.