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The Elegant Economist's Pudding (Salt boil it two hours turn it)
and salt, boil it two hours, turn it out into the dish, and pour wine sauce over it.
CHESHIRE PUDDING (EXCELLENT). 946. Mix two table-spoonfuls of flour, and the yolks of three eggs with a pint of cream; stir it on the fire till it thickens; sweeten and flavour to taste, pour into a dish and bake. Before sending it to table, grate fine sugar over it, and brown it with a salamander.
Two things sit on this page: the closing lines of a boiled suet-type pudding served with wine sauce, and the whole of No. 946, a baked cream custard thickened with flour and egg yolk and glazed at the last moment. The custard is the part you can cook from as written, provided you treat the flour properly.
- The hinge: cook the flour outTwo tablespoons of flour with three yolks in a pint of cream is a pastry-cream base, and it must be stirred over gentle heat until it thickens and loses its raw starch taste — a minute or two of low bubbling once thickened. Take it off too soon and the baked pudding tastes pasty.
- A pint of creamIn a British book of this date a pint is the imperial 20 fl oz, so about 2 1/2 cups. Single cream or a mix of half heavy cream and half whole milk gives a set closer to what was intended than modern heavy cream alone.
- No oven temperature givenThe mixture is already cooked and thickened on the stove, so the bake only needs to set and lightly colour it. Treat it as a slow oven, 300-325F, and pull it when the centre barely trembles; hotter and the yolks curdle at the edges.
- "Flavour to taste"The period defaults are grated lemon rind, a blade of mace infused in the cream, or a spoonful of brandy or orange-flower water. Sugar around 1/3 cup suits the quantity of cream.
- SalamanderA salamander was an iron plate on a handle heated red in the fire and held over the surface to caramelise the sugar. A kitchen blowtorch does the same job; a broiler will work if the pudding is cold and you keep it close and brief.
- Fine sugar"Grate fine sugar" most likely means rasping a lump of loaf sugar to powder over the surface. Use caster sugar in a thin, even layer — granulated sits too thick and scorches before it melts.
- The wine sauce aboveThe fragment ends a boiled pudding, and its sauce would have been sweetened white wine or sherry thickened with butter and a little flour, or beaten to a froth with egg. It is served warm, poured over the turned-out pudding.
- YieldThe custard fills a shallow dish of about 1 1/2 pints and serves four to six as written.