Home › Balloon Pudding › Balloon Pudding
Balloon Pudding
925. Add three table-spoonsial of flour to five eggs, mix them with a pint of new milk, in which put a small lump of butter; warm the milk sufficiently to melt the butter. Butter some teacups, and fill them half full. Bake a quarter of an hour; serve with wine sauce.
A thin baked batter, closer to a popover than to a modern pudding, and it rises and falls for the same reasons. The batter is very loose — five eggs to a pint of milk and only three spoonfuls of flour — so steam does nearly all the lifting.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A quarter of an hour implies a hot oven, somewhere in the region of 425-450F; batters of this kind are generally said to fall if the oven is opened partway through the bake.
- New milkFresh whole milk, unskimmed and unhomogenised. Ordinary whole milk is the right substitute; skimmed milk gives a thin, pale result.
- A pint16 fl oz if the book is American, 20 fl oz (about 2 1/2 US cups) if English. Either way the batter will be thin, roughly the consistency of thin cream.
- TeacupsPeriod teacups were small, on the order of 4-5 fl oz. Buttered ovenproof ramekins, dariole moulds or a deep muffin tin all stand in; china teacups not marked ovenproof should not go into a very hot oven. The batter should half-fill something like ten to a dozen such cups.
- Half full onlyThe instruction is not casual: filled higher, the puddings spill and then sink. The rise is presumably what the name refers to.
- Melt, do not scaldThe milk is warmed only enough to melt the butter. If it goes hotter than hand-warm it will cook the eggs into threads when the two are combined.
- Wine sauceThe period sauce is butter, sugar and sherry or madeira warmed together, sometimes thickened with a little flour or an egg yolk. It is served hot and poured over at the table, as the puddings deflate within a minute or two of leaving the oven.