Home › Recipes › Steamed Cabinet Pudding
Steamed Cabinet Pudding
2 quarts of slices of cake. 4 ounces of butter. 1/2 pound of citron shred fine. 3 pints of milk. 8 eggs. 1/2 cupful of red currant jelly. Sponge cake is best. A 2 quart milk pan will measure the slices. Use shallow pudding moulds having lids. Stick the shreds of citron around the insides on a coating of butter. Spread one side of the cake slices very thinly with butter, the other side with jelly, and pile them in the moulds, not to fit tight. Beat the milk and eggs together--no sugar needed--pour over the cake; when absorbed fill up again. Steam 1 1/2 hours. Turn the puddings out of the moulds and serve whether whole or in slices with either meringue sauce or sauce ecumante poured over.
A bread-and-butter pudding built from stale sponge cake rather than bread, steamed rather than baked. The custard is unsweetened by design — the jelly and the sauce carry all the sugar.
- Let it soak properlyThe hinge is the second filling: pour on the custard, wait until the cake has drunk it, then top up. Cake that goes into the steamer dry in the middle will stay dry, and the pudding will collapse when turned out.
- Quantities and yield3 pints of milk is 6 cups; with 8 eggs that is a soft custard, roughly 1 egg to 3/4 cup milk. The whole batch fills three or four 1-quart moulds and serves twelve or more. Halving it is sensible for a household.
- "2 quarts of slices of cake"A volume measure, not a weight — pack the sliced cake loosely into a 2-quart pan to gauge it. That is about a pound to a pound and a quarter of sponge, and it should be a day or two old so it absorbs without turning to paste.
- Moulds with lidsAny 1-quart pudding basin or metal mould will do, covered tightly with buttered foil and tied, or with a fitted lid. The cover keeps condensation off the custard, which otherwise weeps and pits the surface.
- CitronCandied citron peel, still sold at holiday baking counters and from specialty grocers. Candied orange or lemon peel substitutes cleanly. The shreds are pressed into the butter coating so they pattern the outside of the turned-out pudding.
- SteamingSet the moulds on a rack in a covered pot with water coming a third of the way up, and keep it at a bare simmer for the full 90 minutes. A hard boil curdles the custard and gives a coarse, weepy texture. Top up with boiling water as needed.
- Doneness and unmouldingThe pudding is set when a knife inserted at the center comes out clean, around 175-180F. Let the moulds stand 10 minutes before inverting or the pudding will slump.
- The saucesMeringue sauce is a soft-meringue foam of beaten whites and sugar; sauce ecumante ("foaming sauce") is the same family -- a frothed sweet sauce whipped over hot water, sometimes with wine or brandy. Either wants making at the last minute; both fall as they stand.
Cabinet pudding was a fixture of nineteenth-century English and Anglo-American dining, and appears under a rotation of grander names — chancellor's pudding, diplomat pudding, pouding a la diplomate — none with a settled origin story; the names are generally taken to be flattery of the sort attached to any dish thought fit for an official table. What it really is, is a thrift dish dressed up: stale cake, milk and eggs, transformed by a buttered mould and a border of citron into something you could send to a dinner party. Nor does the custard need sugar — the jelly between the slices and the frothed sauce on top were reckoned to be sweetness enough.