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Brandy Pudding with Brandy Sauce
Dissolve six ounces of crushed loaf-sugar in one-half pint of boiling milk; when cool, beat it with half a dozen eggs. Place at the bottom of a well-buttered dish a thick layer of stoned and chopped raisins and some chopped candied orange-peel; over these place some thin slices of stale bread that have been saturated in brandy, and then pour in the beaten eggs and milk. Cover the mouth of the basin with a piece of buttered paper, tie it down tightly, and let the basin stand for a few minutes; then place it in a saucepan partly filled with water, and steam for nearly two hours. Make a sweet sauce, and flavor it with brandy and vanilla. Turn the pudding out onto a dish, pour the sauce over it, and serve.
A steamed bread-and-custard pudding in the English cabinet-pudding family, written for a cook who already owns a pudding basin and knows what a sweet sauce is. Two details decide whether it succeeds: the water must never boil hard, and the pudding must rest before it is turned out.
- The hinge: gentle steam onlyKeep the water at a bare simmer, halfway up the basin, and top it up with boiling water as it evaporates. A rolling boil drives the custard past setting into curds and the pudding will weep when unmolded.
- Loaf-sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up for use; granulated sugar is the direct substitute. Six ounces is roughly three-quarters of a cup plus two tablespoons by volume, so weigh it if you can.
- Half a pint of milk, six eggsA half pint is one cup (the book is using U.S. measure). One cup of milk to six whole eggs is an unusually egg-heavy custard by modern proportions, which is what makes this pudding firm enough to stand unmolded rather than spoon-soft.
- The basin and the covering"Dish" and "basin" here mean the same vessel: a 1 1/2-quart heatproof bowl or ceramic pudding basin. Buttered paper tied down with string is workable, but a round of buttered parchment under a sheet of foil, crimped at the rim, keeps condensation off the custard more reliably.
- DonenessNearly two hours is right for a 1 1/2-quart basin at a simmer. Confirm with a thermometer at the center: 175-180F, with only a slight tremble at the middle when the basin is nudged.
- BreadUse firm, close-grained white bread a day or two old, crusts removed, sliced thin. Modern soft sandwich loaf collapses into paste once soaked in brandy.
- Turning outLet the basin stand off the heat 10 to 15 minutes before inverting. Straight from the steamer the custard is still slack and will slump on the dish.
- The sweet sauceOscar assumes you know one: either a thin egg-and-sugar custard sauce or a sugar-and-butter sauce thinned with cream, finished off the heat with brandy and vanilla. Add the brandy last so it is not cooked away.
- YieldProbably six to eight servings, though the recipe gives no yield. It is rich enough that small wedges are the norm, and it will reheat in the steamer.
Oscar Tschirky came to the Waldorf as ma tre d'h tel in 1893 and put his name to this collection a few years later, at a moment when the grand New York hotels still cooked from a largely Anglo-French repertoire. Steamed puddings built from stale bread, dried fruit, candied peel and a boozy custard were the backbone of that repertoire's dessert course; the family includes cabinet pudding and its chilled French cousin, pudding la diplomate, both generally traced to nineteenth-century English and French service cookery. The dish is also frugal in its bones, turning day-old bread and a handful of raisins into something a hotel could plate with a sauce and a straight face.