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Fruit Pudding
Put half a pint of milk and half a pint of juice from any kind of canned fruit into a saucepan with two heaped tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar, and place it over the fire until boiling; then move it to the side and stir in quickly the well-beaten yolks of four eggs. Butter a pie-dish and put in one heaped breakfast cupful of the canned fruit. Beat the whites of the four eggs to a stiff froth, stir them lightly in with the custard and pour it over the fruit. Bake in a brisk oven for half an hour.
A baked custard lightened with beaten whites, poured over canned fruit — closer to a soufflé pudding than to a set custard. The heat is the one thing worth arguing with.
- Half a pintOne cup, in the American measure this book uses. So a cup of milk and a cup of fruit syrup, total two cups of liquid to four eggs — a soft custard by design, not a firm one.
- Powdered sugarIn 1896 this meant finely granulated sugar, what is now sold as caster sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and will cloud the custard; use granulated or caster.
- A breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup was larger than a teacup, generally reckoned at about 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Heaped, figure a generous cupful or a little more of drained canned fruit — peaches, pears, apricots and cherries all work.
- Brisk ovenPeriod usage puts "brisk" at around 400F. That is hot for an egg custard and the edges may curdle before the center sets; 350F for 35 to 40 minutes gives a similar puffed top without weeping. If you follow the original heat, set the dish in a pan of hot water.
- The hinge: adding the yolksThe milk and syrup must be off the direct heat before the beaten yolks go in, and they must go in with fast stirring. Pouring hot liquid onto yolks standing still, or over the flame, scrambles them and no amount of baking recovers it.
- Folding the whites"Stir them lightly in" means fold, not beat. Work in a third to loosen the custard, then fold the rest through in a few strokes — the pudding's lift depends entirely on the air surviving the transfer to the dish.
- Fruit syrupModern canned fruit in heavy syrup may well be sweeter than the pack Oscar knew. Taste the syrup and cut the sugar to a single tablespoon if it is cloying; fruit canned in juice needs the full two.
- Doneness and yieldDone when the top is browned and the center barely trembles; a knife inserted an inch from the edge comes out clean. Serves four to six, and it is best warm — it sinks as it cools, which is normal.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, published his cook book in 1896, and its household chapters lean hard on the newly cheap tinned goods of the 1890s. What dates this recipe is not the custard, which is centuries old, but the assumption that a cook has canned fruit on hand and — more tellingly — that the syrup is worth saving rather than pouring away. Commercial canning of peaches, pears and cherries had expanded enormously in the decades after the Civil War, and here the packing syrup serves as half the liquid in a custard. The result sits in a family of dishes variously called fruit pudding or soufflé pudding, all built on the same trick of enriching a custard with yolks and then lifting it with the whites.