Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Clifton Pudding
Clifton Pudding
Put four ounces of ground rice into a saucepan with two breakfast cupfuls of cream, and boil gently until the mixture begins to thicken, stirring occasionally. Place the yolks of six eggs in a bowl, whisk them well with the whites of two eggs, and add gradually four ounces of finely-crushed loaf sugar, two tablespoonfuls of brandy, three ounces of blanched and pounded sweet almonds, and the grated rind of half a lemon. Remove the ground rice mixture from the fire, and when it is cool, stir in the other mixture; pour the whole into a well-buttered pie-dish, place a few slices of candied peel on the top, stand the pudding in a moderate oven, and bake for nearly or quite twenty-five minutes; then take it out and serve it either hot or cold.
A baked rice-flour custard in the English style, thickened on the stove and finished in the oven. The hinge is temperature control: this is a custard, and it will curdle if the rice base is still hot when the eggs go in, or if the oven runs high.
- Ground riceThis is rice flour, though the old grade was coarser than the powder-fine flour sold for baking today. Four ounces is about 3/4 cup of modern rice flour; either works, but the coarser grind gives the slightly grainy body the recipe expects.
- Breakfast cupfulsA breakfast cup is roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces, so read two cupfuls as about 2 cups of cream, possibly a shade more. If the mixture stiffens into paste rather than thick porridge, loosen it with milk.
- Loaf sugarSugar then came as a hard cone or block that had to be broken and crushed. Four ounces of superfine or granulated sugar (about 1/2 cup plus a tablespoon) stands in for it well enough.
- Cool the base"When it is cool" is not optional. Six yolks stirred into a hot rice mixture will scramble. Let it drop to just warm, then temper by beating a spoonful of the rice into the eggs before combining.
- Moderate ovenRead as roughly 350F. A hotter oven will puff and then weep the custard; if your dish is deep, standing it in a pan of hot water gives a smoother set.
- Twenty-five minutesThat suits a shallow pie-dish about 8 to 9 inches across. Judge by the centre: it should be just set with a slight wobble, and a knife inserted an inch from the edge should come out clean. A deeper dish will want 40 minutes or more.
- AlmondsBlanched sweet almonds pounded to a coarse paste; a food processor does it in seconds, but stop before it turns to butter. Do not substitute bitter almonds or almond extract in quantity.
- Candied peelSliced candied citron, orange or lemon peel, laid on top before baking. Press the slices lightly into the surface so they do not scorch.
- YieldSix to eight servings. Good warm; it firms considerably when chilled, which is why the original offers it either way.
Ground-rice puddings of this kind were a fixture of English cookery through the nineteenth century, and Oscar Tschirky's book — assembled from the Waldorf's kitchens in the 1890s, when hotel dining in New York took its cues from London and Paris — carries them alongside the French entrées. The formula is essentially a baked custard in which rice flour does the work that breadcrumbs or suet do in heavier puddings, lightened with extra whites and enriched with pounded almonds, brandy and lemon rind, a flavour trio that had been standard in English sweet cookery since the eighteenth century. The name is the sort of place-label Victorian cooks attached freely to puddings, often after a town or a country house; it is sometimes said to point to Clifton, the genteel Bristol suburb, but the attribution is traditional rather than documented. That a hotel of the Waldorf's standing served it at all is a reminder that the grand American menu of the period was expected to offer plain nursery comforts as well as terrapin and canvasback duck.