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Tipsy Pudding With Cream
This is first cousin to the two preceding, and is popular, but is quite elastic in the way of details that is it can be made and sauced in different ways not worth considering separate puddings. Make the sponge cake mixture preceding or else be quicker and easier butter sponge cake soon to follow, and bake on jelly cake pans which take scarcely five minutes baking. Lay two or three of these flat sheets piled up in a bright pan and pour over a hot sauce of either cream with sugar and wine or else a custard with maraschino or brandy. Or you can partly saturate the sheets of cake, which should be quite light colored, with spoonfuls of brandy and have the custard plain. We have the next when we want to gild refined gold, for extra times, when all else seems stale, flat and unprofitable. is not very tedious to make and there is no difficulty except in getting enough of it.
Whitehead gives a method rather than a formula, and expects you to already have a sponge cake recipe in hand. The specifics worth pinning down are the pans, the very short bake, and the sauce.
- Jelly cake pansThese are shallow round layer pans, typically 8 or 9 inches, used for thin sheets of sponge that would be spread with jelly and stacked. Any shallow round cake pan or a quarter sheet pan cut to size will do; the point is a layer no more than a quarter inch thick.
- Five minutes means a hot ovenWhitehead gives no temperature; a sheet that thin would need a hot oven, in modern terms roughly 425-450F, and is done as soon as it springs back and the edges pull away. The recipe does say the sheets should be "quite light colored."
- The hinge: hot sauce, thin cakeThe sauce goes over the cake hot so it soaks in rather than sitting on top. If the layers are thick or overbaked they turn to sodden pads on the outside and stay dry in the middle.
- Custard temperatureA stirred custard sauce thickens between 170F and 180F and curdles above about 185F. Cook it in a heavy pan or over water, stirring, and strain it before it goes over the cake.
- MaraschinoHe means the clear Dalmatian cherry liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of dyed cherries. A dry cherry liqueur or good brandy gives the flavor intended.
- Wine in the cream sauceWhitehead says only "wine"; in this kind of pudding it usually meant a fortified wine such as sherry or madeira rather than a table wine. Warm it into the sweetened cream rather than boiling it off.
- "A bright pan"Probably a polished metal dish brought to the table, in the days when tinned or silvered ware was the serving vessel. A shallow glass or ceramic dish shows the layers better.
- YieldTwo or three 8-inch layers with sauce should serve roughly six to eight, cut in wedges.
Tipsy pudding is the plainer American cousin of the English tipsy cake, itself a near relation of trifle: sponge soaked in wine or spirits and drowned in custard. In the nineteenth-century American South the same assembly was widely known as tipsy parson, the name often said to be a joke on the clergyman who took a second helping without asking what was in it. Whitehead is writing for hotel and restaurant pastry cooks, which explains his impatience with fine distinctions - he treats it as one of a family of sponge-and-sauce puddings that a kitchen can vary endlessly from the same baked sheets. The literary flourishes are his own habit: "gild refined gold" is from King John and "stale, flat and unprofitable" from Hamlet, both dropped in without attribution.