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West Indian Pudding, with Guava Jelly
Make the rice custard pudding, preceding, and add to it 1 whole egg and 1/2 pound of grated fresh cocoanut. Mix all, and when the pudding is in the pans take 1 pound of pineapple in thin, small slices and lay over the top, slightly pressing it in.
The pineapple, if fresh, should be stewed first in a little sugar syrup; then use the syrup to dilute the guava jelly for sauce.
Bake these puddings no longer than till fairly set in the middle, as the fruit has a tendency to cause a watery separation of the eggs if cooked too long. Curacoa diluted a little and made hot is also a good sauce. For the same reason that apple charlottes were included, the following "sweet entrees" are here placed in succession; namely, because they are used as puddings on occasion.
A hotel-scale variation on a baked rice custard, given as an add-on to the preceding recipe rather than as a standalone. Two things decide whether it works: what you do with the pineapple, and how briefly you bake it.
- Stew the fresh pineapple first, without exceptionStew the fresh pineapple first, as the recipe directs -- fresh pineapple contains bromelain, a protease that attacks egg and dairy proteins and can interfere with a custard setting cleanly. Heating it in sugar syrup deactivates the enzyme. The recipe itself offers no reason beyond the fruit's tendency to cause a watery separation of the eggs. Canned pineapple has already been heat-treated and can go on as is, though the syrup will be thinner and sweeter.
- Bake it barely setThe book gives no oven temperature and does not call for a water bath. "Fairly set in the middle" means pulling it while the centre still wobbles as a unit rather than ripples, in a moderate oven, with carryover heat finishing it. Overbaking is what curdles the egg and weeps the watery liquid the text warns about, and the fruit's own juice makes that failure more likely, not less.
- Grated fresh coconutHalf a pound of freshly grated coconut is roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups, moist and unsweetened. Modern desiccated coconut is far drier; use about 5 ounces and soak it in warm milk or a little of the pineapple syrup for twenty minutes, or the custard will lose liquid to it. Sweetened flaked coconut will throw the sugar balance off badly.
- The base recipeThis is an addition to the rice custard pudding printed immediately before it in the book, plus one extra whole egg to carry the added coconut and fruit. Without that base you have no proportions of rice, milk, eggs or sugar to work from. Any baked rice custard set with whole eggs will stand in.
- The guava jelly sauceGuava jelly is still sold, usually in Caribbean and Latin American groceries, and is very firm. Warm it gently with the reserved pineapple syrup a spoonful at a time until it pours; do not boil it hard or it will string. Aim for the consistency of a thin fruit coulis.
- Curacao as the alternativeOrange curacao, thinned with a little water or syrup and warmed, is the second sauce offered. Warm it rather than reduce it, or the alcohol and the aromatics both go.
- Pans and yield"the pans" implies individual pudding moulds or small deep dishes rather than one large one. Without the preceding recipe's proportions, no yield can be given from this page.
- "Sweet entree"The closing note places this among dishes served in the entree position of a long menu but eaten as a dessert. It is an organizational remark about the book, not an instruction.
The name is a trade description as much as a geographic one: coconut, pineapple and guava jelly were West Indian goods, and putting all three on a rice custard was a way of signalling the islands on a menu card. Guava jelly arrived from Cuba and Jamaica, and it turns up in American cookbooks of the period as a sauce or a garnish as well as something spread on bread. The recipe belongs to the professional side of the craft, written for someone filling a rack of moulds rather than one dish, and its author's real concern is the practical one that governs the whole page: fruit and egg custard are uneasy partners, and the cook who bakes for color instead of set will send out a watery pudding. The recipe notes only that fruit causes the custard to separate and go watery, but the working rule it produced, stew the pineapple first, remains correct.