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Carolina Pudding, with Transparent Sauce
Make the rice custard pudding preceding, and add to it one egg more, and 1/2 pound each of seedless or seeded raisins, currants and candied orange peel. Flavor with orange extract very lightly. The fruit must be strewn evenly over the top after the pudding is in the baking pans, and slightly pressed in with a spoon; else it may all sink to the bottom.
This is a bakery variation written to sit on top of the rice custard pudding directly before it, so it assumes you have that base and its quantities in hand. What it does supply is the one trick that makes the dish work.
- The hinge: fruit on top, not stirred inDried fruit in a loose custard sinks, and a layer of raisins welded to the pan bottom will scorch before the custard sets. Scatter it over the surface and press it just below the level of the liquid with the back of a spoon so it stays suspended as the eggs coagulate.
- The missing base recipeYou need a rice custard pudding: cooked rice folded into a sweetened egg-and-milk custard. The original's quantities are not given here; if you are improvising, something like 3 cups cooked short-grain rice to 4 cups milk, 4 eggs and about 3/4 cup sugar will work, with the extra egg this recipe calls for added on top for body to carry the fruit.
- Quantity is trade scaleA pound and a half of fruit in total, spread across "baking pans" plural, suggests a batch rather than a family dish. If you are making a single 9x13 pudding, cut the fruit back proportionately.
- CurrantsThese are Zante currants, small dried grapes, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Dried sour cherries or chopped raisins are the nearest substitute if you cannot find them.
- Candied orange peelBuy candied peel in strips and chop it yourself; the pre-diced supermarket kind is largely sugar and will dissolve.
- Orange extract"Very lightly" is meant literally. Start with 1/2 teaspoon for a large pudding, or use finely grated zest instead.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven directions at all. Treated as a baked custard, a moderate oven and a water bath are the safe modern reading: bake until the custard is set at the edges and barely trembles at the centre. Too hot an oven curdles the eggs and weeps liquid.
- Transparent sauceThe title promises one and the text does not give it. In pastry-shop usage a transparent sauce is a clear starch sauce: sugar and water thickened with cornstarch, finished off the heat with butter and lemon or orange juice, cooked until it loses all cloudiness.
"Carolina" on a nineteenth-century American menu generally meant rice, after the Carolina lowcountry rice trade that supplied most of the country's domestic rice before the crop's centre shifted west to Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas. A Carolina pudding is therefore a rice pudding, and this one is a rice pudding dressed up for commercial sale: the same custard base as the plain version preceding it, lifted into a second, higher-priced dish by a pound and a half of dried fruit and candied peel. That kind of economy runs through the recipe, and it explains both the trade-scale quantities and the shorthand instruction to make "the pudding preceding" he section section in order, not opening the book at random.< /p>