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Madeira Puddings
920. Take three eggs, weigh against them in their shell sugar, flour, and butter, separately; beat the butter to a cream, beat the eggs well, mix, and beat together, adding the sugar; then put into cups, and bake in a quick oven. Serve with wine sauce poured over them.
This is a pound-cake batter in miniature, measured the old way: the eggs themselves are the scale. Everything depends on how much air you beat into the butter and eggs, since there is no chemical leavening at all.
- Weighing against the eggsThree large eggs in the shell come to roughly 6 oz (170 g), so use about 6 oz each of butter, sugar and flour. Weigh the actual eggs you have rather than trusting the figure, as egg sizes vary.
- No raising agentThe lift comes entirely from creaming the butter and sugar pale and from well-beaten eggs. Add the eggs gradually to avoid curdling the mixture, and fold the flour in at the end rather than beating it, or the puddings will be tough.
- "A quick oven"Period usage points somewhere around 400-450F, though the term was never fixed and the book gives no figure. For small cup puddings, 400-425F (200-220C) with 15-20 minutes' baking is a practical reading; a full-sized cake of the same batter would want a lower heat for considerably longer.
- The cupsThese are teacups or small moulds, generously buttered and dusted with flour, filled about two-thirds. Modern ramekins or a deep muffin tin do the same job. Turn them out while still warm or the butter sets and they stick.
- FlourHousehold flour of the period was likely lower in protein than modern all-purpose. Cake flour, or replacing two tablespoons of the flour with cornstarch, may give a closer crumb.
- Wine sauceThe expected sauce is butter, sugar and Madeira or sherry warmed together, sometimes thickened with a little flour or an egg yolk. Serve it hot and poured over at the table; it soaks in and is half the point of the dish.
- YieldSix to eight small puddings, depending on cup size.
Madeira cake is traditionally said to take its name not from any wine in the batter but from the wine served beside it -- a slice of plain, close-grained butter cake with a glass of fortified wine for a mid-morning caller. The story is widely repeated, though how far it accounts for the name is not certain, and the cake is recorded earlier than the mid-century. Here, though, the wine returns as a sauce, which turns a plain equal-weight batter into a hot pudding for the end of dinner. The equal-weights formula itself is older than the name: it is the same principle as the French quatre-quarts and the English pound cake, and weighing dry goods against the eggs in the shell appears in period cookery books as one way of proportioning such a batter.