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With Orange Jelly
The same mixture as the preceding with 1/2 pound of cocoanut and some lemon extract instead of raisins and brandy. Almonds, citron, cherries and other fruits can be used in like manner.
The same useful mixture also makes a good white cake, white raisin cake, etc. There is something almost apalling in the vaulting ambition of these cooks when they set themselves to naming puddings. How blest, then, is our lot, that for the purposes of this writing we are without the bounds of Great Britain and of Canada, otherwise we, the reader and the scribe, should inevitably encounter and have to pay attentions to, let us see--"Her Majesty's pudding." "Empress Josephine's pudding," "Queen Mab's pudding" This last is cosmopolitan, however, and is a nice enough little pudding, but too fairy like to be eaten with a knife and fork. There is good reason for believing that it is not a Spenserite at all, but a tawny Italian cream pretending to come accredited from. "The court of Mab and of the faery king."
Then there would be "Princess Louise's pudding," "Beatrice pudding," and Marie Stuart's and Sir Watkins'. Besides, there would be shadows in the distance of the illustrious Lord Dundreary's pudding and the honorable Earl of Flaxton's. So every cloud has its silver lining. We might be worse off. As it is, we already have the queen rose of the rose bud gar--I mean we already have the "queen of puddings" and the Sultana Scheherezade's fav--at least, that is, we have a very white sultana raisin pudding with carmine chee--that is to say, with carmine colored sauce; we have the king pudding that rules the British roost, laurel crowned, with all his fierce snap-dragon flames around him; the socialist Jack Cade of puddings is coming on his way, and how do we know but that to meet and dispute with great Haggis, the highland chief, there will arise from our steaming cauldron a stalwart Tuscarora chief, in a yellow mantle, with silk and tassel, just as he won over his Minnehaha long ago, whatever her name may have been then. Meantime make way for the great; here comes imperial pudding. It is still a question whether this should be regarded as a l' imperial or a l' imperiale, but as pudding is masculine in French probably it is imperial. No doubt but in this case the empress had it made to suit the emperor, and not to suit herself, which makes it all the more remarkable.
This is a variation note rather than a standalone recipe: the working instruction is the first two sentences, and everything after "Almonds, citron, cherries" is Whitehead's editorial digression on pudding names. To use it you need the preceding recipe in the book.
- The hinge: find the base mixture"The same mixture as the preceding" is a rich creamed batter with raisins and brandy folded in. Without that page in front of you the quantities of flour, butter, sugar and egg are unknown, and no conversion here can supply them. Read this as a flavour variation on a pound-cake-type batter, not as a recipe you can weigh out.
- Half a pound of cocoanutAbout 2 2/3 cups of dried unsweetened shredded coconut, or roughly 2 3/4 to 3 cups freshly grated. Nineteenth-century "cocoanut" in a recipe of this kind would generally have meant unsweetened desiccated or hand-grated meat; modern sweetened flake will push a cake batter noticeably sweeter and stickier, so buy unsweetened.
- Coconut is not a drop-in for raisinsDried coconut drinks liquid that raisins do not. Replacing half a pound of fruit with half a pound of coconut gives a drier, tighter crumb unless you add a few tablespoons of milk or cream, or soak the coconut briefly first.
- "Some lemon extract"Genuinely unquantified. For a batter of this size, 1 to 2 teaspoons of lemon extract is the usual modern range; the brandy it replaces was carrying both flavour and moisture, so grated lemon zest alongside the extract reads closer to the original intent.
- Citron, cherries, almondsCitron and cherries -- Meant in their candied or glace forms, not fresh; the almonds would be blanched or chopped nuts rather than candied. Dredge the fruit in a little of the measured flour before folding in, or it sinks. Candied citron is now a specialty item; candied orange peel behaves the same way in the batter.
- Cake or puddingWhitehead treats the mixture as convertible: baked in a tin it is "a good white cake," and the surrounding text is about puddings, so the same batter would be steamed in a buttered mould. He gives no times or temperatures; as modern guidance only, a steamed version in a covered quart mould wants roughly 1 1/2 to 2 hours over simmering water, and baked it can be handled like a pound cake.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for the American hotel and restaurant trade in the 1880s and 1890s, and this page shows his habit of letting a one-line variation open into a comic essay. His target is the Victorian fashion for naming puddings after royalty and celebrity: Queen of Puddings and Cabinet and Empress puddings really did fill British and Canadian cookbooks, and the "king pudding... with all his fierce snap-dragon flames" is the flaming Christmas plum pudding. Lord Dundreary was not a real peer but the silly-ass English aristocrat of Tom Taylor's play Our American Cousin, a stock joke figure on the American stage by the time Whitehead was writing, and Minnehaha comes from Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha.