Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › German Pudding
German Pudding
Cut off about one pound of slices of bread from a household loaf, put them in a flat dish, pour in milk enough to cover and let soak thoroughly; then squeeze the bread dry and beat it up with a wooden spoon. Add five ounces of warmed butter beaten to a cream with the yolks of five eggs and the grated peel of a lemon and stir in finally the whites of the five eggs beaten to a stiff froth. Put a rather thick layer of this mixture at the bottom of a buttered mould and a layer of orange marmalade on the top of it; continue in this way until the mould is full, finishing up with a layer of the bread-mixture. Cover the mould, tie it in a cloth, put it in a saucepan of water, and boil for an hour. Turn it out onto a dish, mask the top with more of the orange marmalade mixed with the strained juice of a lemon, and serve with a small quantity of sweet sauce poured round.
A boiled bread pudding of the German Scheiterhaufen/Semmelauflauf family, layered with marmalade and steamed in a covered mould. Nothing here is difficult, but the texture depends entirely on how dry you get the soaked bread.
- Squeeze the bread hardThis is the hinge. Bread that goes into the mould still weeping milk gives a wet, collapsing pudding. Wring it out in your hands or press it in a sieve until it is barely damp, then beat it smooth with a spoon.
- What bread to useA "household loaf" was a plain, everyday loaf, staler and drier than modern sandwich bread, and often plainer and coarser than the fancy white loaves of the period. Use a day-old white sourdough or plain white loaf, crusts trimmed; a pound is well over half a standard loaf. Soft supermarket bread turns to paste and needs a shorter soak.
- Five ounces of butterAbout 10 tablespoons, or 140 g. Warm it only until soft enough to cream, not melted, or it will not hold the yolks in suspension.
- No sugar in the batterThe recipe relies entirely on the marmalade for sweetness, which reads as austere to modern palates. If you want a sweeter pudding, cream two or three tablespoons of sugar with the butter rather than adding more marmalade, which will otherwise sink through the layers.
- Cover the mould, tie it in a clothA pudding basin with a lid, or foil and baking parchment pleated across the top and tied under the rim, does the same job. The cloth was there to keep water out; anything watertight will serve.
- "Boil for an hour"Bring the water to the boil, then hold it at a bare simmer with the water coming halfway up the mould. A hard rolling boil for an hour will curdle the egg mixture at the edges. Check the water level at the half-hour mark and top up with boiling water.
- Turning outLet the mould stand five minutes off the heat before inverting, or the pudding will crack. Run a thin knife round the edge first.
- The glaze and sauceWarm the marmalade with the lemon juice so it spreads; cold marmalade will tear the surface. "Sweet sauce" in this period means a thin custard or a butter-and-sugar sauce loosened with wine or brandy.
- YieldFills a mould of roughly 1.5 to 2 quarts and serves six to eight. Best warm; it firms up considerably as it cools.
The 1896 Waldorf volume attributed to Oscar Tschirky comes from a period when New York hotel kitchens drew on German and Austrian cooking as well as French, and this pudding sits in the same family as the Austrian and southern German habit of turning stale rolls into a sweet dish — Scheiterhaufen, Semmelauflauf and Bohemian žemlovka, all of them layered bread puddings built around fruit or jam. The orange marmalade is a British preserve standing in for the stewed apples or apricot jam a Viennese cook would have reached for, and the boiled-in-a-cloth method belongs to the older English pudding tradition rather than the German one, which baked.