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Fruit Pudding with Rum Sauce
Take a quart pudding-mould four inches high, butter and line it with half a pound of paste. Put four ounces of stoned cherries into a dish with three ounces each of stoned plums and apricots, sift over a quarter of a pound of powdered sugar, mix well and turn it into the mould. Pour half a pint of water into a saucepan, add six ounces of granulated sugar, place it on the stove and boil it for five minutes; then fill up the mould with this syrup and bake it in a very hot oven for thirty minutes. Turn it out, pour over rum sauce, and serve.
A pastry-lined fruit pudding of the plainest English type, written for a cook who already knew what "paste" and "rum sauce" meant. Two things need attention before you start: the mould and the sugar.
- The mouldA quart mould four inches high means a deep, straight-sided tin or metal charlotte mould of about 1 litre capacity, and narrow: a quart at four inches deep is only some four inches across. A deep 1-quart pudding basin will do, but metal conducts better and gives the pastry a chance to set before the syrup soaks it.
- "Paste" and how muchHalf a pound is 8 oz (225 g) of pastry; the book does not say which kind, and a plain shortcrust is the safest reading for a mould that has to hold liquid. That is enough to line the mould generously with an overhang; the recipe gives no lid, so the top stays open and the fruit shows.
- "A very hot oven"Roughly 450\perperiod a modern equivalent of about 450\It that heat the exposed pastry rim will colour fast, so shield the edge with foil once it is golden. Thirty minutes is enough to set the pastry; the fruit will still be loose inside.
- Cut the sugarFour ounces of powdered sugar over the fruit plus a syrup of six ounces more, against ten ounces of fruit, is Victorian sweetness. Halving the syrup sugar gives a dessert most modern palates will finish.
- The syrup is the riskHalf a pint of water boiled five minutes with sugar is still a thin syrup, and pouring it into a raw pastry case guarantees a soft bottom. Fill the mould only to just below the pastry rim, and expect a spoonable pudding rather than a clean slice.
- Fruit weightsThe three, three and four ounces are weights after stoning. Fresh apricots and plums work in season; drained canned or bottled fruit, which a hotel kitchen may well have used out of season, will need little or no added sugar.
- UnmouldingThe recipe turns it out at once; letting it stand a few minutes first will let the syrup thicken slightly and the pastry firm, which makes turning out easier.
- The rum sauceThe recipe assumes a rum sauce given elsewhere. Any rum-flavoured custard sauce, or a hard sauce of creamed butter and sugar beaten with rum, fits the period.
- YieldA quart mould serves four to six as written.
Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel whose name carried the Waldorf's reputation in print, published his Cook Book in 1896, and a good deal of its dessert section is straightforwardly English: pastry-lined and boiled puddings of the kind that had crossed the Atlantic with British cookbooks and stayed on hotel menus for decades. Rum sauce was a common finish for such puddings in American hotel kitchens. The recipe's fixed ounce weights of cherries, plums and apricots suit a kitchen working from a stocked larder, and the fruit could as easily have been bottled or canned as fresh — which is part of why a large kitchen could produce a dish like this out of season.