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Tipsy Pudding
Flavor Boiled Custard with Sherry wine, and pour over slices of stale sponge cake; cover with Cream Sauce I or II.
Three lines that assume you already own the rest of the book. The whole thing is an assembly job, and the only real technique is the custard.
- The hinge: don't scramble the custardBoiled custard is a misnomer — it is cooked in a double boiler and pulled the moment it coats the back of a spoon, around 175-180F. A few seconds past that and it curdles; straining rescues a mildly broken custard but not a grainy one.
- What the boiled custard isUse the book's own boiled (soft) custard: milk scalded, sugar, a little salt and eggs or yolks, cooked over hot water. Look it up in the custard section rather than substituting a modern pastry cream, which is starch-thickened and far too stiff to soak in.
- How much sherryNo quantity is given. Two to three tablespoons of a medium or cream sherry per two cups of custard gives the intended flavor; the alcohol is not cooked off, so it stays noticeable. Some cooks sprinkle a little sherry directly on the cake as well, which soaks more evenly than flavoring the custard alone.
- Stale sponge cake is deliberateDay-old or two-day-old cake absorbs custard without collapsing. Fresh sponge turns to paste. If your cake is fresh, slice it and leave it uncovered on a rack for several hours, or dry it briefly in a 275F oven.
- Cream Sauce I and IIThese are the numbered dessert sauces from the pudding-sauce section, not the savory white sauce of the same name. Look up which of the two you want; their exact make-up differs and should be taken from the book rather than guessed at.
- Assembly and chillingPour the warm custard over the cake, cover, and refrigerate at least four hours so the sponge saturates fully. Add the cream topping just before serving so it does not weep.
- YieldThe recipe specifies no quantities. A batch built on a couple of cups of custard and part of a sponge cake will serve roughly six in dessert dishes, or fill a medium glass bowl.
Tipsy pudding belongs to the English family of trifles and tipsy cakes — sponge cake soaked in wine and blanketed with custard — that crossed to America in the eighteenth century and stayed popular through the nineteenth. In the American South the same dish is often called tipsy squire or tipsy parson, the name generally traced to the joke of a clergyman undone by a dessert; the sherry is the point of it, not an afterthought. Its appearance here, in a school cookbook otherwise devoted to precise measurement, is a reminder that Fannie Farmer's book was also a system: a dish like this could be written in one sentence because the boiled custard, the sponge cake and the two cream sauces all had numbered recipes elsewhere in the volume.