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Cream Curd Pudding
1 pound of dry rennet curd (product of about 4 quarts of milk). 1/2 pound of butter. 3/4 pound of sugar. 4 whole eggs. 6 yolks. Salt. 1/2 pound of raisins and currants mixed. 1 pint of milk. 1/4 pound of fine bread crumbs. Flavoring of lemon, nutmeg or almond.
Rub the curd as taken from the cheese vat or draining cloth through a seive or strainer by means of a masher. Add the other ingredients, the solids first, then the beaten eggs and cream, and flavorings. Bake in a buttered pudding pan about half an hour. Serve with custard or wine sauce. "See, here is a whole eight-gallon can of milk gone sour." "Pity. Those milkmen seldom take pains to thoroughly cool their milk before shutting it up in the cans." "Well, can you make any use of it?" "Yes, it will do very well for the preceding pudding, and is liked as well as anything else in its turn. Let it get a little better curdled, then bring it to about boiling heat; mind it don't burn at bottom; then strain through a large towel and hang the curd up in the towel to drip dry--about 12 hours. But take notice, this is not the best. It will be a curd pudding lemon flavored, but the sweet cream or milk curd made with rennet will make a pudding to resemble almonds."
Buy a dry rennet of the butcher. Place a piece of it in a bottle and fill up with water. When it has stood a few hours mix two or three spoonfuls of the liquor in a pan of milk. In two or three hours the milk will be curdled. Then scaled and drain the curd. Good for puddings, pies, cheesecakes, etc.
A baked cheesecake in all but name, built on curd you make yourself. The instructions assume a hotel kitchen with a cheese vat on hand, so the first job is sourcing the curd.
- The hinge: dry, well-drained curdThe pound of curd wants to be well drained; the book hangs its sour-milk curd in a towel about 12 hours. Curd still carrying whey will give a looser, weepier pudding.
- Buying curd instead of making itA pound of dry rennet curd is closest to fresh farmer cheese, dry-curd cottage cheese or well-drained whole-milk ricotta. Drain purchased ricotta in a cloth overnight; it carries far more whey than the book's curd would.
- Rennet todayThe dried calf rennet bought from a butcher is gone from retail. Use liquid animal or microbial rennet from a cheesemaking supplier and follow the dosing on the bottle rather than the book's improvised bottle of steeped rennet water.
- The soured-milk shortcutThat eight-gallon can clabbered because it was raw. Pasteurised milk left to sour does not clabber cleanly; it spoils, with off flavours and unwanted bacteria. Set the curd with rennet or an acid such as lemon juice or vinegar instead of letting modern milk go off.
- Oven and timingThe recipe gives no temperature, only "about half an hour." Bake until the centre is just set with a slight wobble; an egg mixture this rich turns grainy if it goes much past that.
- The missing creamThe ingredient list gives a pint of milk, but the method says "the beaten eggs and cream." Treat the pint of milk as the liquid, or use half milk and half cream for a richer set. The original is genuinely inconsistent on this point.
- Weights to volumesHalf a pound of butter is two sticks, three-quarters of a pound of sugar is about 1 2/3 cups, and a quarter pound of fine dry bread crumbs is about 1 cup.
- YieldTen eggs' worth of egg and some three pounds of other ingredients make a large pudding. Bake in a buttered dish of about 3 quarts and count on 10 to 12 servings.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late nineteenth-century trade manuals generally credited to Jessup Whitehead, who wrote for hotel and restaurant kitchens and liked to teach through staged shop-floor dialogue, as in the exchange over the soured can of milk here. Curd puddings themselves are much older: English cookery had been baking sweetened rennet curd with eggs, butter, dried fruit and spice since the medieval period, a line that runs through cheesecakes and the Richmond Maids of Honour, and American books inherited it intact. What marks this version as a working kitchen's recipe is the economics. Before mechanical refrigeration was universal, a hotel steward faced with eight gallons of milk turned overnight had to convert it into something saleable or eat the loss, and a pudding that could absorb a whole can of accidental curd was worth knowing. The book's own remark that rennet-set sweet curd tastes of almonds while acid-set sour curd tastes lemony is offered as a cook's impression rather than an established fact.