Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Fruit Pudding with Rum Sauce
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"In a very hot oven 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.