Home › Eve's Pudding › Eve's Pudding
Eve's Pudding
931. Weigh four eggs in their shells, and add the same weight of flour, sugar, and butter; beat the butter into cream, then mix the flour, beating it with the butter, then the sugar; add a little citron, bitter and sweet almonds, or lemon-peel; break the eggs, beat yolks and whites separate, and mix them in separately; then lightly grease some small patty-pans; put a small quantity in each, and let them rise ten minutes before the fire, after which put them into the oven. INDIAN MEAL PUFFS (American). 932. Boil a quart of milk, and stir into it, gradually, eight large table-spoonfuls of Indian meal; four large table-spoonfuls of powdered sugar; and a grated nutmeg. Stir it hard; letting it boil a quarter of an hour after all the Indian meal is in. Then take it up, and set it to cool. While it is cooling, beat eight eggs as light as possible, and stir them gradually into the batter when it is quite cold. Butter some large teacups; nearly fill them with the mixture, set them into a moderate oven, and bake them well. Send them to table warm, and eat them with butter and molasses; or with butter, sugar, lemonjuice, and nutmeg stirred to a cream. They must be turned out of the cups.
Two separate entries sit on this page: a weighed pound-cake batter baked in patty-pans, and an American cornmeal puff. The first cannot be made as printed.
- Bitter almondsThe flavouring calls for "bitter and sweet almonds" together. Bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is ground and wetted; the quantity in a small cake batter is not something to judge by eye, and the raw nuts are restricted or barred from food sale in many countries today. Use a current recipe if you want an almond-scented cake.
- Why the old books used themBitter almond was a standard source of marzipan-like flavour before commercial extracts, and nineteenth-century writers treated it as an ordinary storecupboard item. Modern almond extract, whether natural or synthetic, is benzaldehyde without the cyanogenic glycoside, which is one reason it displaced the nut.
- Weighing against the eggs"Weigh four eggs in their shells" is a proportional method rather than a measurement: whatever the eggs come to, flour, sugar and butter each match it. Four modern large eggs run about 8 oz, so the batter is a small pound cake.
- Patty-pansPatty-pans are shallow individual tins, closer to a bun or tartlet tray than a deep muffin tin. "Let them rise ten minutes before the fire" means resting the filled tins in the warmth of the hearth, not proving with yeast.
- Indian mealIn the second entry, Indian meal is cornmeal. Boiling it into the milk gelatinises the starch so the mixture sets rather than sinking. The batter must be quite cold before the eggs go in so that they do not cook on contact.
- Oven and vessel, second recipeA moderate oven is conventionally reckoned at somewhere around 350F, though the book gives no temperatures. Large teacups stand in for ramekins; buttering them well matters because the puffs are turned out to serve.