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Mousseline Pudding
Put six ounces of butter into a lined saucepan to melt, then mix in six ounces of sugar and the grated rinds of two small lemons and the beaten yolks of fifteen eggs. Stir the mixture over the fire until thickened, but not boiling, then strain it through a fine sieve into a basin. Whisk the whites of fifteen eggs to a stiff froth, and when the above mixture has somewhat cooled, stir them in lightly. Butter a mould, pour the mixture into it, put it into a saucepan with boiling water to three-fourths its height, and steam for twenty minutes. Great care must be taken not to allow the water to enter at the top of the mould. When the pudding is cooked, turn it onto a hot dish, pour some preserved apricots round it, garnish with cherries, and serve.
A steamed lemon soufflé pudding built on nothing but eggs, butter, sugar and rind — fifteen eggs' worth, which tells you it was written for a hotel kitchen with a pastry department and a standing egg order. The hinge is the first stage: the yolk mixture must thicken without ever simmering, or the pudding turns to sweet scrambled egg.
- Scale it downFifteen eggs, 6 oz butter and 6 oz sugar fills a 2½–3 quart mould and serves twelve or more. A third of the recipe — five eggs, 2 oz (55 g) butter, 2 oz sugar, one lemon — works in a 1-quart mould and is far easier to handle.
- WeightsSix ounces of butter is 170 g, or one and a half sticks. Six ounces of sugar is about ¾ cup plus two tablespoons; the recipe does not specify the grind.
- "Lined saucepan"This means a tin-lined copper pan, specified so the acid of the lemon would not react with bare copper. Any nonreactive pan — stainless or enamelled — does the same job.
- Thickening the yolksKeep the pan over low heat, or better over barely simmering water, and stop at about 170–175°F (77–79°C), when the mixture coats a spoon. It will look curdled at the edges before it looks thick in the middle; the sieve that follows is there to catch exactly that.
- Folding the whitesLet the yolk base cool to warm, not cold, or the butter stiffens and the whites will not fold in without deflating. Beat the whites to soft-stiff peaks, not dry, and fold in three additions.
- Protect the mouldButter the mould well, and cover the top with buttered parchment or foil tied or crimped in place — that is what the warning about water entering the top is really asking for. Water should come three-quarters up the outside; keep it at a bare simmer, covered.
- TimingThe recipe's twenty minutes is short for a mould holding the full quantity, and a large mould will probably need considerably longer; judge by the centre being just set and springing back to a light touch. Rest it five minutes before turning out.
- The garnish"Preserved apricots" are apricot halves in heavy syrup, warmed and spooned round the base with a little of their syrup. Canned apricots reduced briefly with their liquid give the same effect; the cherries were most likely candied or preserved rather than fresh.
Mousseline is simply the French for muslin, borrowed by nineteenth-century pastry cooks for anything meant to be light enough to suggest cloth — mousseline sauce, mousseline potatoes, and this class of steamed egg pudding that sits between a soufflé and a bavarois. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 and whose name carried the 1896 Cook Book, collected the hotel's working repertoire rather than inventing it, and this is plainly a professional formula: an egg count instead of a volume, a lined copper pan taken for granted, and a garnish of hotel-pantry preserved fruit. The extravagance of fifteen yolks and fifteen whites, all used, reflects a kitchen where nothing was left over for long and where eggs were cheap relative to labour — the reverse of the modern domestic arithmetic.