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Selkirk Puddings
906. Weigh three eggs in their shells, add the same weight for each of lump sugar, butter, and fine flour; beat up the eggs, whites and yolks together, for a quarter of an hour; pound the sugar fine and sift it; place the butter before the fire, and, when a little warmed, beat it to a froth with a wooden spoon; then mix the eggs and butter well together, after which add the flour and then the sugar. Bake in a mould, leaving room for its rising. It should be sent to table with melted butter and brandy.
This is a weight-of-eggs sponge in the eighteenth-century manner: the eggs in their shells set the measure for everything else. Get the eggs and butter to the same aerated state before they meet and the pudding will rise without any raising agent.
- What the weights come toThree eggs in the shell weigh roughly 6-7 oz (170-200 g) depending on size, so you want about that same weight each of sugar, butter and flour. Weigh your own eggs rather than trusting any figure, since egg sizes have drifted upward.
- Lump sugar, pounded and siftedLump sugar was loaf sugar broken from a cone; pounding and sifting it produced what we buy as caster sugar. Use caster sugar and skip the mortar.
- Fine flourPlain (all-purpose) flour, unbleached and soft if you have it. There is no baking powder here, so all the lift comes from the beaten eggs and the frothed butter.
- A quarter of an hour of beatingFifteen minutes with a whisk by hand corresponds to roughly four or five minutes in a stand mixer on high, until the eggs are pale, much increased in volume and thick enough to fall from the whisk in a ribbon.
- Butter before the fireThis means butter softened by gentle warmth, not melted, then beaten until pale and light. Melted butter will not hold air and the pudding will come out dense.
- Folding orderFlour first, then sugar, both folded in with a light hand. Beating at this stage knocks out the air you spent a quarter of an hour building.
- Mould and ovenA buttered 1.5-quart pudding basin or a 7-inch cake tin, filled no more than two-thirds, as the original's 'leaving room for its rising' requires. The original gives no oven temperature; a moderate oven, around 350F for 40-50 minutes, suits it, until a skewer comes out clean and the top springs back.
- The sauceMelted butter and brandy here is a thin pouring sauce, not a hard sauce: warm 3 oz butter gently, sweeten with a spoonful of sugar if you like, and stir in 2-3 tablespoons of brandy off the heat. Serve it hot over the turned-out pudding.
- YieldSix modest servings, and it is better warm than hot straight from the tin.