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Lemon Sponge Pudding
A SOUFFLE TO BE SERVED WHOLE. 2 pounds of grated ripe apples. 1 pound of sugar. 2 ounces of butter. 4 lemons, grated rind of all, juice of 2. 1/2 cup of milk. 2 ounces of corn starch or flour. 16 eggs.
Make according to directions for the pineapple souffles. Bake in a silver dish or mould that will hold 3 quarts. Pin a band of buttered paper around the mould to make it higher. Fill with the lemon sponge mixture and bake about half an hour. Dredge vanilla flavored sugar on top in the oven. Take off the paper just before sending to the table. Sauce doree, or butter sauce with nutmeg or cream. It can of course be baked in individual style as well as the others.
In old times, a very long while ago, there lived a race of hotel cooks who ran in such a very little narrow rut, and had such very small resources in their trade that when they had made about three different puddings they were at their wit's end, and used to have to butt their heads against the wall to shake up their memories, so they would know what on earth to make next. Then they would recollect something to make which required almonds, raisins and citron; but when they ran to the hotel storeroom they found none of those articles in stock. Then they had to butt their heads against the wall again harder, till they could think of something else, and that would require apples. But the store room would be bare of apples also. And then they had to go and find a harder place in the wall and butt their heads against it harder and longer every time. That was in the dark ages. What charity it would have been, and what suffering it would have prevented if some person had stood up and told them what they might do in the case of a short storeroom. How if they had no bread they could use cake; if they had no yolks of eggs they could make a pudding of the whites; if they had no eggs at all nor milk they could do just as well with a pudding that would be ruined if even milk or eggs came near it; and if they had no pineapples they could do very well indeed with pumpkins.
Pumpkin pudding must be older than pumpkin pie, because pumpkin pie is pumpkin pudding over the water. The first appearance of pumpkin in history is in the story of a young person named Cinderella, who, finding her fine coach was changed again into nothing but a hateful pumpkin that came rolling up to the door, felt vexed, and thought she would make a pudding of it.
A hot soufflé-pudding built on grated apple rather than a flour panada, thickened lightly and lifted by a very large quantity of egg. The method is withheld — Whitehead sends you back to his pineapple soufflé — so the working order has to be reconstructed.
- The missing method"Make according to directions for the pineapple souffles" sends you to a recipe not reproduced here. The likely working order, on the evidence of the ingredients: cook the fruit with the sugar and butter until thick, stir in the cornstarch slaked in the milk and cook it out, beat in the yolks off the heat, then fold in the whipped whites. Nothing rises without that fold, and it should go into the oven at once.
- Sixteen eggsA great quantity for a three-quart mould, though the fruit purée is heavy and needs a good deal of aeration. Nineteenth-century eggs generally ran smaller than a modern large egg, so twelve or thirteen large eggs is a reasonable modern substitution.
- Oven heatWhitehead gives no temperature. A soufflé pudding of this size wants a steady moderate oven, 350F, with no opening of the door; hotter and the paper collar scorches while the centre stays slack.
- Half an hour is optimisticTiming -- Whitehead gives about half an hour for the full three-quart mould. In a modern oven that may prove short for a mould this size; check at thirty minutes and be prepared to give it longer, looking for a distinct wobble at the centre rather than a set firm.
- The paper bandA buttered paper collar pinned around the mould lets the mixture climb above the dish, and is taken off just before the dish goes to the table. Parchment cut to stand two inches proud, buttered on the inner face and tied rather than pinned, does the same job.
- Silver dishThe silver is chosen with the dining room in mind, but the recipe does bake in it and send it out as it comes. Any straight-sided ovenproof dish of three quarts serves; butter it and dust with sugar so the mixture can grip the sides as it rises.
- Sauce doréeA "golden sauce": egg yolks, sugar and wine or lemon juice whisked over hot water until foaming and thick, of the same family as sabayon. Whitehead's alternatives are a butter sauce with nutmeg, or cream.
- Vanilla sugar and the applesVanilla sugar is caster sugar left a week in a jar with a split pod; dredged over the top late in the bake it glazes rather than dissolves. For the fruit, use a cooking apple that breaks down — Bramley, or a mix with Golden Delicious — since two pounds grated will lose a good deal of water in the pan.
- Yield and timingThree quarts serves twelve to sixteen. Like any soufflé it waits for no one; have the sauce made and the table sitting before it comes out.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for the men who ran hotel and steamboat kitchens in the 1880s and 90s, and the long comic digression tacked onto this recipe carries one of his recurring themes: the enemy is not a lack of skill but a lack of imagination in front of a half-empty storeroom. His argument here — that a pudding can be built on apples if the almonds and citron have run out, on egg whites alone if the yolks are gone, on pumpkin if there is no pineapple — is a working cook's philosophy of substitution rather than a nostalgia piece. The dish itself sits in the old British line of lemon and apple "sponge" puddings, close kin to the transparent and lemon-curd puddings that ran through nineteenth-century American cookbooks, while the paper collar, the silver mould and the sauce dorée belong to the hotel dining room's French register.