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Baked Cabinet Pudding. Meringue
Made with slices of cake and citron in small slips; custard poured over and baked. 2 quart panful of slices of cake. 4 ounces of butter. 1/2 pound of citron cut fine. 2 quarts of milk. 6 eggs. 1 lemon, juice and grated rind. 1/2 cupful of brandy. Meringue for the top.
Butter two pudding pans. Place in a layer of slices of cake. Then sprinkle in citron and bits of butter. Place another layer on that with citron and butter again and there should still be thin slices enough left to cover the citron with. Mix the custard of eggs and milk--no sugar needed--add brandy and lemon juice and rind, pour over the cake in the pans and bake about 20 minutes. When done meringue over in the way already detailed for meringue puddings. When dry slices of cake are used the lemon juice is still more needed to freshen the flavor. The brandy may be omitted without harm.
A cabinet pudding to be served whole can have the citron in patterns on moulds spread with butter. Wrap paper about the outsides to prevent too hard baking of the crust. Bake half an hour. Meringue after turning out and brown the top with a red hot shovel.
Life is full of such compensations as these. Forbidden to use bread any more in our puddings we must manage to get along with cake. But wait, before commencing on the laborious savoy cake puddings there is something else. What a world of Aunt Betsey Trotwoods there used to be eating arrowroot pudding for the sake of poor blacks that never existed with a solicitude like hers for Copperfield's imaginary sister! It is plain it was an advertising scheme. The argument was: there are those poor blacks in the West Indies; you have caused them to be freed from bondage; there is nothing they can do for a living but make arrowroot; if they cannot sell their arrowroot they will die, therefore, to save their lives, you must eat arrowroot pudding. Then arrowroot found a good market and the great majority of all the gold spectacled people in the civilized world were eating all they could. The gold spectacle distinction has to be made because people below that rank could not very well afford it as the poor people who made arrowroot would have died if they had not sold it at a high price. Eating arrowroot pudding is not such a very unpleasant way of being benevolent, but, bless their kind hearts, there came a time when the gold spectacles could not possibly eat any more, and barrels of arrowroot lined with blue paper became uncomfortably numerous in the merchants' warehouses. Then they began mixing it with rice flour and starch and reducing the price, and there never being a very striking difference between starch and arrowroot the cheap article has at last very nearly banished arrowroot altogether, except from the drug stores. All the annexed receipts for starch puddings will do equally well for arrowroot, in case there are any people solicitous for the welfare of arrowroot manufacturers still left in this world.
Boiled Corn Starch Pudding. Corn Starch Minute Pudding. Hasty Pudding. 2 quarts of milk. 1/4 pound of sugar. 1/2 pound of corn starch, good weight. 2 ounces of butter. 2 or 3 yolks of eggs. 1/2 teaspoonful of salt. Vanilla or almond flavoring.
Boil the milk with the sugar in it. Mix the starch with a little milk cold; thin it with some hot milk out of the kettle; pour it quickly into the boiling milk and stir two minutes, or till it is well thickened. Have ready the two yolks beaten with a spoonful of milk, take off the kettle, beat the yolks in, the heat of the starch will cook them, then the butter and flavorings. Turn the pudding out of the kettle it was made in to a bright pan buttered slightly, and keep warm till wanted. Serve with lemon syrup sauce or with hot cream.
There are not many puddings as cheap and simple as that. Nothing else is so quick, and it is never slighted at table. "But why was it, the pudding so nice and rich and firm when first made afterwards turned to liquid in the pan and could not be dished up?"
It was kept too hot and cooked too much.
Two recipes run together here: a baked cabinet pudding built from cake trimmings, and a cornstarch pudding tucked in after a long digression on arrowroot. Both are hotel-scale, written for a cook feeding a dining room.
- ScaleTwo quarts of milk, six eggs and two pudding pans will serve roughly 16 people. Halve everything for a single 2-quart dish.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake at 325F; the custard should be just set with a slight wobble at the centre, around 170-175F internally. The 20 minutes quoted may be short for a full 2-quart pan, and it is the set, not the clock, that decides.
- Water bathThe paper wrapped around the mould in the second version does what a bain-marie does: it keeps the outside from setting hard before the middle cooks. A roasting pan of hot water is the modern equivalent and is worth using for the pans as well.
- CitronCandied citron, the thick pale peel sold at Christmas for fruitcake. Candied lemon or orange peel substitutes directly. Cut it fine, as instructed, or it sinks in ribbons.
- The custard is deliberately leanSix eggs to two quarts of milk is a thin custard by modern standards, and no sugar is added because the cake carries it. It works only if the cake is genuinely sweet trimmings of pound or sponge cake; with plain or day-old bread-like cake the pudding will taste flat.
- Dry cake and lemonThe note about lemon juice is the practical hinge. Stale cake tastes dusty rather than sweet, and the acid plus the grated rind is what makes the pudding read as fresh rather than as leftovers.
- MeringueThe meringue method is cross-referenced to an earlier page. Beat whites to soft peaks with about 2 tablespoons sugar per white, spread over the baked pudding and set it in a 350F oven for 12-15 minutes until dry and pale gold.
- The red hot shovelA salamander, heated in the fire and passed over the surface to colour it without cooking the pudding underneath. A broiler on high for a minute or two, watched constantly, does the same job.
- Cornstarch pudding proportionsHalf a pound of cornstarch to two quarts of milk is roughly 1 3/4 to 2 cups to 8 cups, which gives a stiff pudding; the recipe turns it out of the kettle into a buttered pan and keeps it warm to serve with lemon syrup sauce or hot cream. For a softer, spoonable pudding use half that starch.
- Why it turned to liquidThe book answers its own question correctly. Cornstarch gels break down with prolonged heat, and egg yolk contains amylase that thins starch further if it is held warm rather than brought briefly to the boil. Cool it promptly instead of keeping it hot on the stove.
Cabinet pudding is an English steamed or baked pudding of sponge cake, dried fruit and custard, generally traced to the early nineteenth century and known variously as chancellor's pudding and Newcastle pudding; the name is usually explained as a nod to a cabinet minister's table, though no one has ever pinned the story down. In a professional pastry book like this one it earns its place for a plainer reason: it converts yesterday's cake trimmings into a dish that can be sent out whole and glazed. The aside about arrowroot is Jessup Whitehead in his usual mood, and the Aunt Betsey Trotwood he mocks is the character in Dickens's David Copperfield, whose solicitude for Copperfield's imaginary sister is the point of the joke. West Indian arrowroot became a fashionable invalid food in Britain in the nineteenth century, and it was steadily adulterated and undercut by cheaper corn and potato starches, which is consistent with the recipe that follows the digression being made with cornstarch and not arrowroot at all.