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Semolina Pudding
849. Add two ounces of semolina, previously soaked in a little cold milk for half an hour, to a pint of boiling milk, in the same way as for sago pudding, and add the egg and lemon-peel also, as in that pudding (which see at par. 847).
A short entry that leans on the sago pudding a couple of numbers earlier for its eggs, sugar and method. Read as written it gives you the grain-to-milk ratio and little else, so the working details are below.
- The ratio is the whole recipeTwo ounces of semolina (about 55 g, a generous third of a cup) to a pint of milk. If that is an imperial pint, it is 20 fl oz or 2.5 US cups; the result is a loose, pourable custard-thickness pudding rather than a sliceable one.
- What is missing hereThe egg and lemon-peel quantities live in paragraph 847, along with any sugar the companion recipe may call for. Without that entry the amounts are not recoverable from this text alone.
- Semolina has changedVictorian semolina was a coarse wheat middling, generally coarser than the fine semolina sold today, which hydrates faster; the half-hour cold soak is therefore less critical now, though it still guards against lumps. Do not substitute semolina flour or couscous.
- Adding to boiling milkRain the soaked grain in while whisking, then drop to a bare simmer and stir for eight to ten minutes until it thickens and loses its raw, chalky taste. Undercooked semolina stays gritty no matter how long it later bakes.
- The eggLet the thickened semolina cool below a simmer before beating the egg in, or it will scramble in streaks. This is the step that decides whether the pudding is smooth.
- Lemon-peelPared zest only, no white pith, infused in the milk as it heats and lifted out before serving. A whole strip is easier to remove than grated zest and gives a cleaner flavour.
- Oven, if you bake itThis entry says nothing about an oven, and no baking temperature can be drawn from it. If you choose to bake it, roughly half an hour in a moderate oven until just set and lightly coloured; a dish of water underneath helps prevent the custard curdling at the edges.
- YieldA pint of milk makes four small nursery servings, or two generous ones. Serve warm with jam, stewed fruit or cream.
Semolina -- from the Italian semolino, a diminutive of semola, bran or middlings -- is the coarse granular fraction left when hard wheat is milled, and it became widely available in British kitchens through the same nineteenth-century grocery trade that dealt in sago, tapioca and arrowroot. All were sold as light, digestible starches suitable for children and invalids, and cookery books of the period treat them almost interchangeably: write one milk-pudding method out in full, then dispatch the rest in two lines apiece, as this entry does by pointing back to the sago pudding. That editorial shorthand suggests how standardised the milk pudding had become by the mid-Victorian decades. The formula -- grain simmered in milk, enriched with egg, scented with lemon peel -- is the ancestor of the semolina pudding still served in British schools and nurseries well into the twentieth century.