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Lemon Souffle Pudding
Chop fine three ounces of butter and work it into about one-half pound of flour. Pour one and one-half pints of milk into a saucepan, and when almost boiling, stir the flour and butter into it. Continue stirring over the fire until it thickens, then beat up the yolks of seven eggs and six ounces of sugar and stir them into the flour and milk; pour the mixture into a shallow pan, whip well, let it stand till cold and then beat the whites of seven or eight eggs to a stiff froth. Turn the pudding into a buttered mould, allowing plenty of room for swelling, cover and steam for an hour and a half, keeping the water under the steamer boiling all the time. When removed from the steamer, dip the mould into cold water for a moment, take it out, let stand for one minute, and then turn the pudding onto a hot dish. Serve brandy sauce with it.
A steamed pudding built on a thick flour-and-milk panade, closer to a heavy soufflé than to a batter pudding. The written text has two gaps a cook needs to fill before starting.
- The lemon is missingNothing in the method mentions lemon at all, though the title promises it. Add the finely grated zest of two lemons to the milk as it heats, and a tablespoon or two of juice with the yolks and sugar; the zest carries more flavour than the juice in a mixture this rich.
- The whites are never folded inThe recipe tells you to beat seven or eight whites stiff and then moves straight to the mould. Fold them into the cold panade in three additions, cutting rather than stirring, and stop while a few streaks remain. This is the hinge of the dish: overworked whites give a dense, wet pudding no amount of steaming will rescue.
- Weights in modern termsThree ounces butter is 6 tablespoons; half a pound of flour is about 1 3/4 cups; one and a half pints of milk is 3 cups; six ounces of sugar is roughly 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons.
- Making the panadeAdding dry flour-and-butter crumbs to near-boiling milk will lump unless you work fast with a whisk. It is easier and gives the same result to cook the butter and flour together as a roux for a minute or two, then whisk the hot milk in gradually. The mixture should pull away from the pan in a mass.
- Cool it properly"Let it stand till cold" is not padding: whites folded into a warm base deflate immediately. Spreading it in a shallow pan, as directed, speeds the cooling; press cling film to the surface to stop a skin forming.
- Mould and steamingButter a large pudding basin or mould generously and fill it no more than two-thirds; the rise is considerable. Cover with buttered foil pleated down the centre and tie it, set on a rack over boiling water in a large covered pot, and top up with boiling water so it never runs dry over the full ninety minutes.
- UnmouldingThe brief dip in cold water contracts the pudding away from the metal. Do not leave it more than five or ten seconds or the outer layer chills and tears. Turn out onto a warmed dish and serve at once, as it settles quickly.
- Brandy sauce and yieldThe period sauce is a hard sauce or a thin custard sharpened with brandy; either suits. The quantities here feed eight to ten as written.
Oscar Tschirky was never formally the chef of the Waldorf, but as its maître d'hôtel from 1893 he lent his name to this 1896 collection, which reads as a working record of what a large American hotel kitchen actually turned out. Steamed puddings of this kind — a cooked flour-and-milk base enriched with yolks and lightened with whipped whites — sit between the English boiled pudding tradition and the French soufflé, and were popular in hotel service, plausibly because they hold their shape and can be unmoulded to order rather than collapsing on the walk from kitchen to table like a true soufflé. The brandy sauce marks it as a cold-weather dessert; the same base, differently flavoured, appears across nineteenth-century cookbooks under a variety of names. The absent lemon is a reminder that these books were compiled at speed from working notes, for cooks who were expected to know what the title implied.