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Brandy, Wine or Curacoa Sauce
3/4 pound of white sugar. 3/4 pound of fresh butter. 10 eggs. 1 pound of flour.
Cream the butter and sugar together by warming and beating. Beat in the eggs, one or two at a time, then the flour in small portions. To beat the mixture after flour is all in makes the pudding fine grained and whiter, but not so light. Don't beat it much. Steam in fancy tall moulds if to go to table whole; to be dished up in slices any sort of cake or jelly moulds suit. These puddings need to be put on in good tight steamers when the water is already boiling, and be kept steaming 1 3/4 hours, or longer. Pretty name, isn't it? the next, sultana pudding. It is not going to be told here how it compares in goodness with the queen pudding which we had away back, because a comparison between a queen and a sultana would be odious. However, this is a white rose.
This is a plain steamed pound-cake batter — equal-ish weights of sugar, butter and flour, bound by ten eggs and nothing else — pressed into service as a pudding. Note that the page carries over a heading from the previous entry, so the brandy, wine or curaçoa sauce named in the title is not actually described here.
- Weights, not cupsWork by weight as written: 12 oz (340 g) sugar, 12 oz butter, 1 lb (450 g) flour. Ten large eggs run about 1 lb 2 oz out of the shell, which is what makes the batter cohere.
- No leavening at allThere is no baking powder or soda. Every bit of lift comes from air beaten into the warmed butter and sugar and from the eggs, which is exactly why the text warns against beating after the flour goes in — gluten development past that point gives a fine, tight, pale crumb rather than a light one.
- "Warming and beating"The butter should be soft and pliable, around 65-70F, not melted. If it oils out, the eggs will not emulsify into it and the batter will curdle; a cool room and patience do the job that a stand mixer now does in four minutes on medium.
- Where are the sultanasThe aside announces that the *next* recipe is the sultana pudding; this one, the author says, 'is a white rose'. So the absence of fruit here is expected, not an omission. If you want the sultana version, fold in about 8-12 oz sultanas tossed in a spoonful of the measured flour, added last and with minimal mixing.
- The steamer is the hingePut the moulds into steam that is already running hard and keep it running without lifting the lid. A stall in the steam, or water that dips below a simmer, sets the outside and leaves a raw seam through the middle. Fill moulds no more than two-thirds and butter them well; cover each with buttered paper or foil so condensation does not soak the top.
- Timing and donenessOne and three-quarter hours suits a large tall mould; smaller individual moulds will be done well before that. The recipe itself allows 'or longer'. Judge by a skewer coming out clean and the pudding pulling slightly from the sides, and keep the water topped up with boiling water from a kettle.
- The missing sauceThe sauce the title advertises would in this period have been a hard sauce or a thin egg-and-sugar sauce flavoured with brandy, sherry or curaçao, spooned over the hot slices. Any standard brandy hard sauce fills the gap.
- YieldThe full quantity is a large batch — about 3 1/2 lb of batter once the eggs are counted in. Halving it is straightforward since the egg count divides evenly.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to Jessup Whitehead's run of late nineteenth-century manuals written for hotel and restaurant kitchens, which accounts for both the scale of the batch and the running commentary — Whitehead talked to his readers between recipes, and the aside about queens and sultanas is his voice, not an editor's. Steamed puddings of this kind were the workhorse dessert of American hotel dining rooms: a single batter could be moulded tall for a whole-table presentation, or moulded flat and sliced for plating, and it held for hours in a warm steamer. "Sultana" here means the pale seedless raisin, whose name is generally traced to the Turkish and Levantine trade it came through; curaçao, the orange-peel liqueur from the Dutch Caribbean island, was a standard bar-shelf flavouring that pastry cooks borrowed for sauces. The page also carries a heading mismatch — a sauce title over a pudding batter.