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Bath Pudding
910. Boil four ounces of ground rice in one pint of cream till tender, and set it to cool. Add to it six yolks and two whites of eggs well beaten, with six ounces of pounded sugar, six ounces of butter, thirty sweet almonds blanched and pounded, and one small glass of brandy. Mix all the ingredients well together, and bake a quarter of an hour or more.
A rich baked ground-rice custard of the kind Victorian cooks called a "pudding" whether or not it had suet or pastry. The recipe gives no oven heat and an improbably short bake, so both need judgement.
- Ground riceThis is milled rice, not whole grains, and is close to modern rice flour, though period ground rice was often a little coarser than today's finest milling. Rice flour from an Asian grocer or the baking aisle will serve; do not substitute ground long-grain rice pulsed in a blender, which stays gritty.
- Cooking the riceFour ounces of rice flour to a pint of cream (if an imperial pint of 20 fl oz, roughly 2 1/2 cups) thickens fast and scorches faster. Whisk it in cold, bring it up slowly and stir constantly until it is the texture of thick porridge, then cool it before the eggs go in or they will scramble.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 325-350F, suits an egg-and-cream mixture; anything hotter will curdle it and weep.
- The timing is shortA quarter of an hour will not set this quantity in a single dish. "Or more" is doing a lot of work: expect 40-50 minutes in a buttered 1 1/2-quart dish, until the centre is just barely trembling. Fifteen minutes is realistic only for small individual moulds.
- Six ounces of butterThat is 1 1/2 sticks, and it should be soft rather than melted so it creams into the sugar and yolks. The mixture may look split before baking; it comes together in the oven.
- The almondsThirty blanched sweet almonds is roughly 1 1/2 oz, or a scant 1/3 cup. Pound or grind them to a paste with a little of the sugar to stop them oiling. Sweet almonds are ordinary almonds -- the distinction mattered when bitter almonds were still sold for flavouring.
- EggsSix yolks with only two whites gives a richer, less rubbery set than whole eggs would. Save the four spare whites rather than adding them.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. It is very rich; serve warm rather than hot, with nothing more than stewed fruit or a spoonful of cream.
History: Bath is one of several English towns whose name became attached to fashionable baked goods -- Bath buns and Bath cakes among them. The formula here, ground rice cooked in cream and then enriched with pounded almonds, brandy and a great deal of butter and egg yolk, is essentially a baked almond custard thickened with rice flour rather than the older breadcrumb or marrow-based puddings. Rice flour appears frequently in Victorian pudding chapters, valued for the smoothness of its set. Pounded almonds had long been a staple of English sweet cookery, going back to the almond-milk dishes of medieval and early modern fast days.