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Orange Marmalade Pudding
912. Take two table-spoonsful of marmalade, three ounces of butter melted, and one ounce of sugar. Beat this well together in a mortar. Add the yolks of five eggs and the whites of two, and put it in a dish, immediately after which place it in the oven. Three-quarters of an hour will bake it.
A very rich baked pudding, closer to a marmalade custard than to a sponge: there is no flour and no raising, only eggs, butter, sugar and preserve. It rises a little in the oven and sinks as it cools, which is normal.
- The hinge: keep the heat gentleThis is an egg custard with a lot of butter in it, and it will curdle or weep if driven hard. The book gives no oven setting; a moderate oven, in the region of 325F, suits such a mixture, and standing a deep dish in a roasting tin of hot water is a sensible precaution. The stated three-quarters of an hour fits a shallow dish.
- Scale of the thingTwo tablespoons of marmalade, 3 oz butter, 1 oz sugar, five yolks and two whites makes a small pudding — perhaps four modest servings, or two generous ones. It is worth doubling if you are feeding a table.
- Melted butter, not warm butterThree ounces is about 85 g. Melt it and let it cool to barely tepid before it meets the eggs, or the yolks will begin to set as you beat.
- The mortarPounding in a mortar was the period way of breaking the marmalade peel down and emulsifying it with the butter. A food processor or a stick blender does the same in seconds; a bowl and a whisk will work if your marmalade is fine-cut.
- Five yolks, two whitesThe yolks give richness and colour, and the two whites add some structure. Substituting whole eggs adds more white and will give a firmer, less custardy result.
- Straight into the oven"Immediately after which" is in the text, so have the oven at temperature before you start beating; a standing mixture of melted butter and egg is liable to separate.
- The dishThe recipe says nothing about preparing the dish. Butter it well.
- ServingGood warm rather than hot, with cream or a thin custard. A bitter Seville marmalade gives a far better result here than a sweet breakfast preserve, since the only other sugar is a single ounce.
The British Cookery Book, compiled by J. H. Walsh and published in 1859, gathered contributed and reprinted receipts from across Britain, which is why entries like this one are numbered and terse rather than explained. Marmalade puddings belong to a family of nineteenth-century "store cupboard" sweets built on a jar of preserve, eggs and butter — the same logic that produced jam roly-poly and treacle sponge. Scotland is popularly associated with chip-cut orange marmalade, and Scottish recipes for it survive from the early eighteenth century, though the word itself comes from the Portuguese quince preserve and English recipes for orange marmalade are older still; by the time this book appeared Dundee had a commercial marmalade trade.