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Bridge-Whist Pudding
1 pint milk 1 egg Sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 cup thick cream 1/4 box or 1 tablespoon gelatine 1/4 cup water English walnuts Candied cherries Lady fingers Make a custard of the milk and egg, sweetening to taste and flavoring with vanilla; to this add the cream, whipped, and the gelatine, dissolved in the water. Add chopped walnuts and cherries and turn into a mold lined with lady fingers. Stand aside for several hours before serving. 1/3 cup rice 1/2 cup milk 1 cup sugar
A gelatine charlotte of the card-party era: a thin boiled custard, set with gelatine, lightened with whipped cream and packed into a ladyfinger-lined mold. It is straightforward, but the temperature at which the gelatine meets the cream decides whether it sets smooth or grainy.
- The hinge: cool the custard before foldingDissolve the softened gelatine into the custard while the custard is still hot, then cool the mixture until it is the consistency of unbeaten egg white before folding in the whipped cream. Fold warm custard into cream and the cream deflates; fold into already-set gelatine and you get rubbery threads through the pudding.
- A quarter box of gelatineGelatine of this period was sold in boxes that recipes of the day treated as roughly an ounce, so a quarter box is about a quarter ounce — close to one modern envelope of powdered gelatine, roughly 7 g or 2¼ teaspoons. The recipe's alternative "1 tablespoon" is a little more by loose volume, but the two were used interchangeably. Soften it in the ¼ cup cold water for five minutes before dissolving.
- Making the custardOne egg to a pint of milk is a very thin custard, correct here because the gelatine does the setting. Cook it in a double boiler, stirring, only until it coats a spoon — about 170–175°F. Past 180°F it curdles, and there is not enough egg in it to hide the fact.
- Sugar "to taste"About ⅓ cup in the custard suits most palates, remembering that the candied cherries and ladyfingers bring their own sweetness. Sweeten before the gelatine goes in, while stirring is still easy.
- Lining the moldSplit the ladyfingers lengthwise and stand them cut side inward, trimming the ends flat so they sit tight against the bottom. A 1½-quart charlotte mold, straight-sided souffle dish or loaf pan all work; a strip of parchment underneath makes unmolding possible without dipping the whole thing in hot water.
- "Stand aside for several hours"Four hours minimum, overnight preferably, in the refrigerator — the original assumed an icebox or a cold larder. It will not set at room temperature.
- YieldSix to eight servings from a 1½-quart mold. Cut with a thin knife wiped between slices.
- The stray last line"1/3 cup rice, 1/2 cup milk, 1 cup sugar" appears to be the opening of the next recipe on the page and has nothing to do with this pudding. Ignore it.
Bridge whist was the transitional form of the game between straight whist and auction bridge, spreading in the United States in the 1890s and fashionable in American and British parlors chiefly through the 1900s, before auction gradually displaced it over the years after 1910 — which dates this dessert roughly and explains the name. Card-party refreshments, one imagines, had their own logic: they had to be made hours ahead, held cold without attention, be cut and served in the interval between rubbers, and be eaten with a fork by someone still thinking about the last hand. A molded gelatine cream met all four conditions. The construction itself is a charlotte russe, generally traced to the early nineteenth-century French kitchen and to Carême, here simplified for a household cook — commercial powdered gelatine, apparently available on the American market from about 1890, replaced the long labor of clarifying calf's-foot jelly and put this sort of dessert within reach of anyone with an icebox.