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Cherry Pudding
Place one-half pound of warm butter in a basin and work it thoroughly with a spoon, adding the yolks of twelve eggs, one at a time, and then one-half pound of powdered sugar. When it begins to froth, put in a quarter of a pound of bread-crumbs, a small quantity of cinnamon and finally the whites of eight eggs well-whisked. Then take a large and fairly thick timbale-mould, butter it well, and on the bottom, pour a layer of the mixture. Then put in a layer of preserved and well-drained cherries, not allowing them to lie against the sides of the mould and continue, in this way until full. Cover the mould with a baking-sheet upon which are live embers, place in the oven and bake for twenty-five minutes. Then turn it out onto a dish, cover the bottom of the pudding with cherry sauce, and serve.
A rich baked custard-crumb pudding in the Austro-German manner, built on twelve yolks and half a pound of butter. The instructions assume a coal range and a cook who knows what a timbale mould is; both need translating.
- Warm butter means softenedThe butter should be pliable enough to cream with a spoon, not melted. If it liquefies, the mixture will not hold air and the pudding bakes dense.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term means finely ground sugar, closer to today's caster or superfine sugar than to modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Superfine granulated is the right substitute.
- The bread-crumbsA quarter pound of crumbs, about a cup if they are dry and fine (soft fresh crumbs of the same weight will measure closer to two), from stale white bread with the crust removed. They must be dry and fine; fresh soft crumbs will slump and give a wet centre.
- Embers on a baking sheetThis is top heat, the old method of setting a pudding's surface before the interior overcooks. In a modern oven simply cover the mould loosely with buttered foil for the first two-thirds of the bake and uncover to colour.
- Oven temperatureOscar gives none. Bake at 350F; a batter this eggy will curdle and weep at anything hotter.
- TimingTwenty-five minutes seems short for the large mould the recipe specifies; a deep two-quart timbale will likely want considerably longer, perhaps 45 to 60 minutes, and it is done when a skewer in the centre comes out clean and the pudding pulls slightly from the sides.
- Keeping the cherries off the sidesThis is the hinge. Fruit touching the metal sticks and tears the crust when you unmould, and its syrup scorches. Leave a clear half-inch of batter all round, and drain the cherries hard on a cloth first.
- UnmouldingLet the baked pudding settle briefly before turning it out. Left to go cold it grips the mould; straight from the oven it is too fragile to hold its shape.
- YieldTwelve yolks and eight whites, with half a pound each of butter and sugar, make a substantial pudding, enough for ten or twelve. The cherry sauce is not optional garnish, it supplies the acidity the batter lacks.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 volume records the repertoire of a New York hotel kitchen that ran on French technique and a good deal of Central European baking, and this pudding belongs squarely to the latter: a buttered mould lined with an enriched crumb batter, layered with preserved fruit, baked and turned out with a fruit sauce, in the manner of the Viennese and Bohemian puddings that travelled west with German-speaking cooks through the nineteenth century. Preserved cherries rather than fresh ones point to a kitchen working year-round from stores of bottled fruit, most likely sour morellos, whose acidity balances the yolk-heavy batter far better than a sweet dessert cherry would. The direction to cover the mould with a sheet of live embers is the older continental method of baking under top heat, and its survival in a Waldorf recipe of the 1890s is a reminder that the hotel's grandeur still rested on coal-fired ranges and cooks trained before thermostats existed.