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Individual Cabinet Puddings
The same ingredients and amounts as the preceding. Cut the slices of cake with a small round, octagonal or scalloped cutter, spread them with butter and jelly and pile them in custard cups. Fill with the mixed eggs and milk and refill when the first is soaked in. Steam half an hour with a cloth over the steamer under the lid to prevent dropping of water. Place a spoonful of meringue on top of each one when they are turned out of the cups, and brown them slightly with a red hot salamander or shovel held over.
A steamed cake-and-custard pudding built in individual moulds. The recipe assumes you have just read the one before it, so the quantities have to be reconstructed.
- The missing ingredient list"The same ingredients and amounts as the preceding" points back to a recipe not reproduced here; from this page the components are cake, butter, jelly, eggs and milk, plus meringue. Cabinet-pudding custards of the period commonly run in the region of 3 eggs to 1 pint (2 cups) milk with a little sugar and flavouring; scale to the number of cups you are filling.
- Custard cupsOvenproof ramekins or dariole moulds, well buttered. Butter them generously and, if you want a clean turn-out, line the base with a disc of parchment.
- The refilling step is the pointDry cake drinks a surprising amount of custard. Fill, wait several minutes until the level drops, then top up again before steaming, or the finished puddings will be crumbly and full of dry pockets.
- The cloth under the lidThis is the instruction that decides whether the puddings are good. A tea towel laid over the cups and tucked under the steamer lid catches condensation; water dripping onto the tops pits the custard and makes it weep. Cover each cup with foil if you prefer.
- Steaming heatKeep the water at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil. Thirty minutes at a gentle simmer sets the custard; hard boiling curdles it and blows holes through the cake. They are done when the centre is just firm to a light press.
- Salamander means broilerA salamander was an iron plate heated red in the fire and held above food to colour it. Use a kitchen blowtorch, or the oven broiler for under a minute with the puddings on a tray — long enough to tint the meringue, not to warm the pudding through.
- The meringueA spoonful of raw beaten white browned briefly on top is barely cooked. Use pasteurised whites, or make an Italian meringue with hot syrup, if you are serving anyone who should avoid undercooked egg.
- Yield and servingThe yield depends on the quantities in the preceding recipe and the size of your cups. Turn them out while still warm and serve at once, with a thin custard sauce, a fruit sauce or the same jelly used inside, warmed and loosened.
Cabinet pudding is an English steamed pudding of buttered cake or bread, dried fruit and custard, known through the nineteenth century under several grand names — Chancellor's pudding and diplomat pudding among them — the titles generally taken as a nod to the well-appointed dining rooms where it was served rather than to any particular official. Its real usefulness was economy: it turned yesterday's sponge or pound cake trimmings into a dish that could be sent out hot. That is why it belongs in a trade manual like this one, and why this version is portioned into individual cups rather than one large mould. Hotel and restaurant service was moving steadily toward single servings that could be turned out, sauced and finished to order, and the salamander held over each meringue is the same tool a cook would have heated in the range.