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Custard Pudding
851. Mix by degrees a pint of good milk with a large spoonful of flour, and some sugar to the taste: boil them together for ten minutes, then add the yolks of five eggs, and a little pounded cinnamon. Butter a basin that will exactly hold it, pour the batter in, and tie a floured cloth over. Put it in boiling-water over the fire, and turn it about for a few minutes, to prevent the eggs going to one side. Half an hour will boil it. Put currant jelly on it, and serve with sweet sauce. 852. Another plainer Custard Pudding. -One pint of new milk poured boiling upon three spoonsful of flour; beat them up together, then add three eggs, and boil an hour. 853. Rich baked Custard Pudding. Add four eggs well beaten to a quart of milk, nutmeg and sugar to taste, line the dish partly, and edge it with paste before pouring in the custard. 854. Little Custard Puddings. -Three eggs, three spoonsful of flour, a gill of milk, a little salt, sugar, and nutmeg. Bake in teacups, and serve immediately.
Four versions of the same idea, from a boiled flour-thickened custard to small cups baked in the oven. The numbers are terse, so a few things need pinning down before you start.
- The hinge: keep the custard below a simmerIn 851 the flour-and-milk base must be cooled a little before the yolks go in, or they will scramble on contact. Once the basin is in the water, keep it at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil; hard boiling curdles the eggs and weeps liquid into the pudding.
- Imperial measuresA pint here is the imperial 20 fl oz, not the American 16, and a quart is 40 fl oz. A gill is 5 fl oz, a little under two-thirds of a US cup. Scaling the milk up by about a fifth over US measures gives the texture the writer intended.
- "A large spoonful"Read the spoonfuls as tablespoons: perhaps 15 g of flour for the 'large spoonful' in 851, and somewhere between 25 and 45 g for the three spoonfuls in 852 and 854, depending on how heaped. These are genuinely loose measures. In 851 the flour is largely insurance against splitting, so err on the light side; in 854 the proportion to a gill of milk makes it a batter.
- Boiling in a basinButter a pudding basin that the mixture just fills, cover with a floured cloth or a pleated round of buttered parchment tied under the rim, and stand it in water that comes halfway up. Turning the basin for the first few minutes, as directed, keeps the yolks from settling to one side before they set.
- An hour is too long for 852A pint of milk with three eggs sets in a basin in about 40 minutes at a simmer; the full hour may allow for the uneven heat of an open fire. Test with a skewer at the centre and stop when it comes out clean but still moist.
- Oven heat for the baked versions853 and 854 give no temperature. A moderate-to-slow oven, around 325F, with the dishes stood in a water bath, until the centre is just barely wobbly: about 45 minutes for the lined dish, 20 to 25 for teacups.
- Paste for 853"Edge it with paste" means a rim of shortcrust round the lip of the dish rather than a full lining. Blind-bake that rim briefly before the custard goes in, or the wet mixture will keep it pale and raw.
- Sweet sauce and jellyThe sweet sauce of the period is melted butter thickened with a little flour, sweetened and flavoured with wine or brandy; a thin pouring custard or a plain sugar-and-butter sauce serves the same purpose. Warm the currant jelly slightly so it spreads over the turned-out pudding without tearing it.
- Yield851 and 852 each serve about four; 853, made with a quart of milk, serves more like six to eight. 854 makes four to five teacup puddings, and the instruction to serve immediately is real: they sink as they cool.
The British Cookery Book, compiled in the late 1850s from contributed and reprinted receipts, gathers variants of a dish rather than settling on one, which is why four custard puddings sit here in a row with no attempt to reconcile them. The first two belong to the older English tradition of the boiled pudding, cooked in a buttered basin tied under a floured cloth and lowered into a pot on the open fire, a method that survived in British kitchens long after reliable ovens arrived; 853 and 854 are baked, one in a paste-edged dish and one in teacups. The flour is the telling detail: a true custard is milk, eggs and sugar alone, but a spoonful or two of flour buys insurance against curdling over an uncontrollable heat, and the graded sequence from the five-yolk version down to the "plainer" three-egg one suggests a book written for households counting eggs. Serving the finished pudding under currant jelly and a sweet wine sauce was one common nineteenth-century dressing for a plain milk pudding, turning something thrifty into a dish fit for the second course.