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Steamed Brandy Pudding
2 quarts of slices of cake. 1/2 pint of brandy. 1/2 pint of finely chopped, seedless raisins. 4 ounces of butter. 2 1/2 pints of milk. 8 eggs. 1/2 pound of almonds, blanched and split.
Line the moulds with the split almonds stuck to a thin coating of butter. Spread the minced raisins upon the slices of cake; fill up the moulds, sprinkling in the brandy by spoonfuls, and the rest of the butter in bits. Then beat the eggs and milk together, pour in all the moulds will hold and the cake will absorb. Steam 1 1/2 hours.
A hotel-scale cabinet pudding built from leftover cake and a plain custard. Nothing here is difficult, but the proportions are written for a bakeshop and the vessel matters more than the ingredient list suggests.
- The hinge: steam gentlyThis is a custard, and custard curdles above a hard boil. Keep the water at a bare simmer under the moulds and the pudding sets smooth; a rolling boil gives you a weeping, pitted interior. It is done when a knife near the centre comes out clean, around 175-180F internally.
- UnitsA half pint is 1 cup, so 1 cup brandy and 1 cup chopped raisins. Two and a half pints of milk is 5 cups. Four ounces of butter is one stick. The "2 quarts of slices of cake" is a loose volume measure, not a weight — figure roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb of cake, cut in slices and packed in without crushing.
- The cakeStale pound cake, sponge or plain butter cake, a day or two old. Fresh cake collapses into paste; anything iced or heavily flavoured will fight the custard. At this scale the recipe would plausibly have been a way of using up unsold counter stock.
- EggsEight eggs with 5 cups of milk gives a soft, loose custard by design, since the cake absorbs a good deal of it. Eggs of the period were not size-graded and may have run smaller than a modern large egg, but no exact equivalence can be given.
- MouldsIndividual dariole moulds or timbales, or one large pudding basin. Butter thickly, press the split almonds against the sides in a pattern, then chill briefly so they stay put while you fill. Cover each mould with buttered foil or a pleated paper to keep condensation out.
- Steaming setupStand the moulds on a rack in a covered pot with water reaching halfway up their sides, and top up with boiling water as it evaporates. The recipe gives 1 1/2 hours; smaller individual moulds will set sooner than a large one, so check them early.
- Let it rest before unmouldingTen minutes out of the steamer lets the custard firm up. Turn out too soon and the almond-lined shoulder tears away.
- Yield and servingEnough for 10 to 12 portions. Serve warm with a hard sauce, a brandy sauce or thin pouring cream. The alcohol is only partly driven off by steaming, which was rather the point.
Steamed puddings of buttered cake or bread, dried fruit and custard were known in English kitchens as cabinet or chancellor's pudding, and on French menus as pudding à la diplomate — the almond-lined mould and the turned-out dome are the marks of that family. What makes this version a professional's recipe is the first line: two quarts of cake slices, a quantity that suggests a bakery with cake on hand rather than a domestic kitchen. The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late nineteenth-century trade manuals written for hotel and restaurant bakers, where quantities run in quarts and pints and nothing edible was thrown away. The brandy flavours the pudding, and the split almonds pressed into butter give the turned-out dome its finish.