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Bombay Pudding
Beat three whole eggs with one pint of milk, sweeten to taste with loaf-sugar, pour them into a lined saucepan, and stir over a slow fire until thickened, but not boiling. Move the saucepan to the edge of the fire, and stir in one wineglassful of brandy, a small piece of butter, and a little grated nutmeg, then grate some cocoanut and add it to the mixture. Butter a shallow dish, line it with a good puff-paste, and spread the cocoanut mixture over it. Place the pudding in a brisk oven, and bake until lightly brown. Serve the pudding either hot or cold.
A brandied coconut custard baked in a puff-paste shell. The hinge is the stovetop stage: the custard must thicken without ever simmering, or it will curdle before it reaches the oven.
- Lined saucepanMost likely a copper pan lined with tin, the lining keeping eggs and other acidic ingredients from reacting with bare copper. Any heavy stainless or enameled saucepan does the same job.
- Loaf-sugarRefined sugar sold in hard loaves or cones and broken or cut up as needed; by the 1890s the term also covered cut lump sugar. Granulated sugar is the direct replacement; the recipe leaves the quantity to taste, and about 1/3 cup suits a pint of milk for a dessert of this richness.
- WineglassfulCommonly reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces in kitchen books of this era. The recipe has you move the pan to the edge of the fire before adding it, so keep it off the direct heat; cold spirit into hot custard over the flame invites curdling.
- CocoanutFresh coconut, cracked and grated on a hand grater. Unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut works; about 1 cup, and reduce the sugar slightly if you can only find sweetened.
- Thickened, but not boilingStir until the custard coats a spoon and reads 170-175F. Above about 180F the eggs scramble. If it breaks slightly, straining may recover some of the texture, though a badly curdled custard will not come back.
- Brisk ovenRoughly 400-425F. The recipe says only to bake until lightly brown; in a modern oven, giving the pastry the full heat for the first 10-12 minutes and then dropping to 350F for another 20-25 minutes will set the filling gently rather than souffleing and cracking it.
- Puff-paste in a shallow dishStore-bought all-butter puff pastry is a fair substitute. Chill the lined dish before filling, and blind-bake it if your pastry is thick, since a wet custard on raw puff paste tends to stay soggy underneath.
- YieldFills a 9-inch shallow dish and serves about six. Cold, it slices more cleanly than hot.
The name says more about the period than the dish. Late-Victorian and Edwardian cooking often borrowed the names of colonial ports and cities for dishes containing coconut, curry powder or tropical spice, and "Bombay" is generally read as shorthand for exactly that; a wholly different Bombay pudding, made from semolina, circulated in Anglo-Indian households of the same years. What Oscar Tschirky records here is a European baked custard tart with grated fresh coconut and brandy folded in, the sort of thing a Waldorf pastry section could turn out in quantity. Tschirky, the Swiss-born maitre d'hotel who became known simply as Oscar of the Waldorf, was not a cook by trade, and his 1896 collection reads as an inventory of what a large New York hotel kitchen was expected to produce on demand rather than a personal repertoire. The reliance on hand-grated fresh coconut is a reminder that whole coconuts were a common grocery item in these years.