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Raspberry Pudding
826. Half fill a deep dish with ripe raspberries mashed with sugar, beat six eggs light, and mix them with one pint of milk, sugar, and grated nutmeg. Pour this over the raspberries, bake half an hour in a moderate oven, serve as cold as possible.
A raspberry custard pudding of the simplest kind: sweetened crushed fruit under an egg-and-milk custard, baked and served chilled. The proportions are generous and the method leaves out the two things that decide whether it sets properly.
- The hinge: gentle heatSix eggs to one pint of milk is a very rich custard and it will curdle if pushed hard. A moderate oven here means 325-350F, and a water bath (a roasting tin with hot water halfway up the dish) is worth the trouble even though the original does not mention one.
- Deep dish sizeA dish of roughly 2 quarts, half filled with fruit, suits the quantity; anything smaller will be tight once the custard goes in. Something wider and shallower will set faster than the stated half hour; a tall narrow dish will need 45 minutes or more.
- Judging donenessHalf an hour is a starting point, not a rule. The custard is done when the edges are set and the centre still trembles as a single mass when the dish is nudged; it firms further as it cools.
- Sugar quantitiesThe recipe calls for sugar twice and specifies neither. Allow about 2-3 tablespoons to sweeten a pint of raspberries and 3-4 tablespoons in the milk and egg mixture, adjusting for the fruit.
- RaspberriesMash the fruit with the sugar and let it stand 15 minutes so the juice draws. Frozen raspberries work but release more liquid; drain some off or the custard will be slack at the bottom.
- MilkNineteenth-century milk was not homogenised, and recipes of this kind generally assumed a whole, cream-topped milk. Whole milk is the minimum here; half milk and half single cream gives a richer texture.
- Serving"As cold as possible" means several hours in the refrigerator, ideally overnight. Serves six to eight.
Baked custards poured over fruit run right through British and American cookery of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and this is about as plain a version as the form gets: fruit below, custard above, nutmeg on top. Nutmeg was a very common seasoning for dishes made of eggs and milk in this period, appearing in baked custards, junkets and possets. Raspberries were a short-season fruit, ripening from midsummer, so a recipe like this belonged to a few weeks of the year and was one way of using fruit before it spoiled. The instruction to serve it as cold as possible is a small reminder that chilling took real effort in a kitchen without refrigeration, depending on ice or a cool larder.