Home › German Pudding › German Pudding
German Pudding
934. Two ounces of fine flour, two ounces of powdered sugar, two ounces of butter, eight eggs, leaving out four of the whites, a little orange-flower water, and white wine; melt the butter with some cream, mix all well together, and bake in small cups. Another. Half a pound of bread-crumbs, six ounces of butter, half a pound of brown sugar, half an ounce of mixed spice (the cinnamon should predominate), four eggs. Mix the bread-crumbs, sugar, yolk of eggs, and the butter (just melted), the spice, and a little salt, altogether in a large basin, then add the whipped white of eggs. Put it into a mould, and bake or steam in a moderate oven one hour. The above ingredients are sufficient to make one large pudding or two small ones.
Another.-Take a piece of crumb of bread, as much as you think will fill a mould. Pour over it some boiling milk; when soaked, drain it on a sieve, and squeeze it in a cloth, then beat it quite fine with a
Three related baked-custard-and-bread puddings, given one after another without much in the way of quantities for the liquids. The second version is the most complete and the easiest to follow.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" here means 325-350F. The second pudding, baked in a mould for an hour, is best set in a water bath at that temperature so the edges do not dry before the centre sets.
- First version: cream unmeasured"Melt the butter with some cream" gives no quantity. For 2 oz flour, 2 oz sugar, 2 oz butter and eight eggs (four whites omitted), about 1/2 cup of cream is a sensible reading; the batter should pour like thick cream. This is essentially a rich baked custard, not a cake batter.
- Small cupsRamekins or dariole moulds of about 4 fl oz, buttered and set in a roasting tin of hot water. They will take 20-25 minutes at 325F -- pull them when barely set at the centre.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, and still potent. A teaspoon flavours the whole batch; more turns the pudding soapy. The white wine is unmeasured too; a dry unoaked wine suits the mixture better than anything sweet.
- Mixed spiceHalf an ounce is roughly 4 to 5 teaspoons, a heavy hand by modern taste even for a mixture that weighs close to two pounds before baking. Mixed spice is a British blend generally built on cinnamon with nutmeg, allspice, cloves and sometimes coriander or ginger; the note that cinnamon should predominate is the useful part, so build your own if you have no jar of it.
- Bread-crumbsFine crumbs from stale white bread rather than the coarse packaged sort. Weigh rather than measure -- half a pound of fine dry crumbs is roughly 2 cups, considerably more if the crumbs are fresh and soft.
- Folding the whitesThe whipped whites are the only leavening in the second version. Whip to soft peaks, fold in a third to loosen the heavy crumb mixture, then fold the rest through in two additions and get it into the mould promptly.
- Steaming as the alternativeIf you steam rather than bake, cover the mould tightly with buttered paper and foil and keep the water at a bare simmer for the full hour, topping up as needed. Steaming gives a moister result than the oven does.
- YieldThe second pudding, as stated, makes one large or two small moulds -- about six to eight servings. Serve warm with a wine sauce, custard, or simply cream.
"German pudding" in Victorian English cookery books is less a single dish than a label for the rich egg-and-breadcrumb puddings of the period -- close cousins of the German Semmelpudding and Brotpudding, which likewise use soaked or crumbed white rolls, butter, spice and separated eggs to turn stale bread into something worth serving at table. Printing two or three variants under one number, as here, is common in nineteenth-century compilations. The orange-flower water in the first recipe belongs to the older eighteenth-century tradition of floral-scented baked custards, while the brown sugar and heavy cinnamon of the second sit closer to the Victorian steamed-pudding repertoire, and the two stand side by side without comment.