Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Chocolate Pudding with Almonds
Chocolate Pudding with Almonds
Blanch and pound a number of almonds; warm two ounces of butter, beat it well with two ounces of caster-sugar, mix the yolks of six eggs, two heaped tablespoonfuls of grated chocolate, and the almonds. Whisk the whites of the eggs to a snow and add this to the mixture. Butter a mould, dredge powdered sugar into it, pour in the mixture, cover it with a sheet of buttered paper, and serve cold.
As printed, this recipe stops short: the mould is filled, covered with buttered paper, and then the pudding is simply "served cold." The cooking step — almost certainly a steaming or water-bath baking, which is how a buttered, papered pudding mould is always treated — has dropped out of the text.
- The missing step is the whole dishA mixture of six raw yolks, six raw whites, butter, sugar, ground almonds and grated chocolate is not a pudding until heat sets it. Followed literally, the instructions produce a bowl of uncooked egg foam that is then chilled and eaten, which is a salmonella risk with no mitigating step anywhere in the method.
- No time, no temperature, no vessel sizeEven if the intended steaming is inferred, the recipe gives no mould capacity, no depth of water, no duration and no test for doneness. There is nothing here to reconstruct a safe cooking time from, so use a current recipe for a steamed or baked chocolate pudding instead.
- Caster-sugarSuperfine sugar, finer than granulated and coarser than confectioners'. It dissolves readily when creamed with butter. Granulated sugar pulsed briefly in a food processor is the usual substitute.
- Grated chocolateIn Oscar's day this generally meant a hard block chocolate, unsweetened or only lightly sweetened, grated on a box grater. Two heaped tablespoons is a small amount by modern standards — perhaps an ounce — and the dish leans as much on almonds as on chocolate.
- Blanch and poundWhole almonds dropped in boiling water for a minute, slipped from their skins, then worked to a paste in a mortar. A food processor does the same job, though the oil separates faster; a spoonful of the sugar in the bowl keeps the almonds from turning to butter.
- Two ouncesTwo ounces of butter is four tablespoons, half a stick. Two ounces of caster sugar is a scant third of a cup.
- Dredging the mouldButtering and then dusting the interior with powdered sugar gives a thin caramelised crust and helps the pudding release. Flour or fine crumbs were used the same way for savoury and suet puddings.
The Waldorf, where Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel, worked in a French idiom, and this is a small pudding of the biscuit family — creamed butter and sugar, yolks, ground almonds, whipped whites — closer to a soufflé pudding than to the boiled suet puddings of the English tradition.