Home › Ratafia Pudding › Ratafia Pudding (Soak two sponge-cakes)
Ratafia Pudding (Soak two sponge-cakes)
913. Soak two sponge-cakes as for trifle, put over them one or two kinds of preserves, beat the yolks of four eggs, and the white of one; add three-quarters of a pint of new milk and a little nutmeg, sweeten and flavour it; pour it upon the cakes in the dish, place two ounces of ratafias on the top, and bake a quarter of an hour.
Another. Boil a quart of cream with four laurel leaves; take them out, and break in half a pound of Naples biscuits, the same of butter, R some sherry and nutmeg, and a little salt. Take it off the fire, cover it up; when it is almost cold, put in two ounces of blanched almonds grated fine, and the yolks of five eggs. Mix all well together, and bake half an hour. Grate a bit of sugar over the pudding.
Two puddings share one entry: a simple baked custard over soaked sponge-cake, and a richer cream-and-biscuit pudding whose flavouring cannot be reproduced safely. Read the note on laurel leaves before anything else.
- Laurel leaves are the problemThe "laurel" boiled in the cream of the second version is cherry laurel (Prunus laurocerasus), used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a cheap stand-in for bitter almond. Its leaves release hydrogen cyanide when bruised and steeped, and the dose in a hot infusion is unpredictable; poisonings involving laurel preparations were recorded, and the flavouring fell out of culinary use as its danger became understood. The second pudding should not be made at all — use a current almond-flavoured baked custard recipe instead. Bay leaves are a different plant and are not a substitute in this preparation.
- RatafiasSmall, hard, bitter-almond macaroons about the size of a shirt button, sold by the pound. Modern amaretti, or amaretti di Saronno broken up, stand in for them. Two ounces is roughly a generous handful.
- Naples biscuitsLong, dry, finger-shaped sponge biscuits — what a supermarket now sells as savoiardi or ladyfingers. Half a pound is about 225 g.
- "Soak as for trifle"Sponge-cake for trifle was moistened with sweet wine or sherry, sometimes with a little brandy, until damp through but not collapsing. The recipe assumes the reader knows this from the trifle entry.
- New milk and the pint"New milk" is fresh whole milk, unskimmed. Three-quarters of an imperial pint is 15 fl oz, close to 1 3/4 US cups. The quart in the second version is 40 fl oz.
- Oven and timing for the first versionNo oven heat is given. A moderate oven, around 325-350F, is a reasonable modern reading. Fifteen minutes is unlikely to set a custard of four yolks in 15 fl oz of milk in a deep modern dish; in a water bath expect appreciably longer, until the centre barely trembles. A wide shallow dish will set faster than a deep one.
- Sweeten and flavourNo quantity is given. Two to three tablespoons of sugar suits the milk volume, since the preserves and the ratafias already bring sweetness. "Flavour" in recipes of this kind commonly means a little sherry, brandy or lemon peel.
- YieldThe first pudding will probably serve about four.