Home › Hot Puddings › Swiss Pudding (Grated rind one lemon eggs cup)
Swiss Pudding (Grated rind one lemon eggs cup)
Grated rind one lemon 5 eggs ½ cup powdered sugar Cream the butter, add flour gradually; scald milk with lemon rind, add to first mixture, and cook five minutes in double boiler. Beat yolks of eggs until thick and lemoncolored, add sugar gradually, then add to cooked mixture; cool, and cut and fold in whites of eggs beaten stiff. Turn into buttered mould, cover, and steam one and one-fourth hours; while steaming, be sure water surrounds mould to half its depth, and never reaches a lower temperature than the boiling-point. 2 cup butter 1 cup sugar ½ cup milk
A steamed lemon soufflé pudding built on a milk-and-flour panada. The ingredient list has been scrambled in this printing and one quantity is missing outright, so read the whole thing before starting.
- The ingredient list is brokenAs printed, the ingredients are split across the start and end of the entry: grated rind of one lemon, 5 eggs, 1½ cup powdered sugar, ½ cup butter, 1 cup sugar, ½ cup milk. The two sugar figures may well be a duplication thrown up by the scrambling, since only one sugar step appears in the method, but the original list cannot be reconstructed from this page with certainty.
- The flour is missingThe method says "add flour gradually" but no quantity survives in this text. For a panada of this type the flour is usually close in volume to the butter, but the original figure is genuinely lost here and any number is a guess.
- "Powdered sugar" in this periodIn turn-of-the-century American books powdered sugar means a finely ground sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold under that name now. Granulated or superfine sugar is the closest modern substitute.
- Scalding the milkScald means heating to just below the boil, around 180F, until the surface shivers and a rim of bubbles forms at the edge. The lemon rind steeps in it during that time and gives most of the flavour, so use only the yellow zest and none of the white pith.
- Five minutes in the double boilerThe butter-flour-milk base needs to be stirred the whole time and should thicken into a smooth paste that pulls from the sides. Note that the recipe adds the yolks to the cooked mixture and cools after; letting the base cool a little first is a sensible precaution against streaks of set egg.
- Folding, then steamingThe hinge of the dish is the beaten whites: fold them in with a cutting motion until barely combined, and get the pudding into the mould and over the heat straight away. A pudding that stands on the counter deflates and steams heavy.
- The mould and the waterButter a 1½ to 2 quart lidded pudding mould or a bowl covered with buttered foil tied down. Water halfway up the sides, kept at a steady boil for the full hour and a quarter, and topped up with boiling water only — the instruction never to let it fall below boiling is the reason the pudding rises.
- Doneness and servingIt is done when a skewer in the centre comes out clean and the pudding has drawn slightly from the mould. Unmould hot; it will sink as it cools. Serves roughly six to eight, and it suits a lemon or vanilla sauce, though the recipe as printed calls for none.
Steamed puddings of this kind were a workhorse dessert of the nineteenth-century kitchen, made in a covered tin mould set in a kettle of water on the back of the range — a technique that needed no oven and tolerated the uneven heat of a wood or coal fire. What sets this one apart from the heavy suet and fruit puddings of the type is its construction: a cooked flour-and-milk base enriched with yolks and lightened with beaten whites, which is a soufflé method carried out in a mould instead of a dish. The name "Swiss" was attached to a good many light, egg-rich European-styled desserts in Anglo-American cookbooks of the period, and no Swiss origin is documented for this one. The insistence that the water "never reaches a lower temperature than the boiling-point" reflects the period's turn toward treating cookery as a matter of measurable, repeatable conditions rather than judgement by eye.