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Raspberry Pudding
Put four ounces of butter into a basin, warm and beat it up with three well-beaten eggs. Stir in four ounces of sugar and one pound of raspberry jam. Have in readiness one-half pound of fine breadcrumbs, place a layer of them at the bottom of a buttered mould, then a layer of the jam mixture, and keep on in this way until the whole is used up. Place the mould in a moderate oven, and bake for about an hour. Turn the pudding out onto a dish, and serve. Ratafia Pudding (Baked).
Pour one quart of cream into a saucepan, sprinkle in one-half pound of dry sponge-cakes well crushed, and boil for about half an hour. Add about three ounces of butter, four ounces of sugar, one wineglassful of wine, and a small quantity of grated nutmeg to flavor, and stir well over the fire for a few minutes, then turn them into a basin to cool. When it is nearly cold, add the well-beaten yolks of four eggs and two ounces of sweet almonds blanched and pounded with a little lemon juice, and mix all thoroughly together. Place the mixture in a pie-dish, sprinkle over a little sugar, place it in a sharp oven, and bake in a sharp oven until done. Take it out, and serve. Rice Pudding (Baked).
Take one teacupful of rice boiled in milk until it is three-fourths cooked, add two well-beaten eggs, two ounces of grated nutmeg to taste, and a little cream as well is an improvement. Stir together well, put the pudding into cups and bake. Serve hot with wine sauce.
Rice Pudding (Boiled).
Wash thoroughly one teacupful of rice, place it in a saucepan with one pint of milk, and boil until it is tender, then move it from the fire, and mix in a small piece of butter. Chop fine four ounces of suet, beat the yolks of four eggs with the whites of two, and thoroughly wash and dry one-fourth pound of currants. Mix these ingredients with the rice, add also one-fourth pound of sugar, one wineglassful of brandy and a little grated nutmeg. Butter a pudding-basin, turn the mixture into it, tie a pudding-cloth over the top, place it in a saucepan of boiling water, and boil it for two hours. At the end of that time, turn the pudding out of the basin onto a dish, and serve.
Four puddings run together here under one heading, in the compressed style Oscar used throughout the book. The first, the raspberry pudding, is the only one that reads cleanly as written; the others need judgment before you start.
- Oven temperaturesA "moderate oven" is conventionally taken as about 350F. A "sharp" oven, called for twice in the ratafia pudding, means a hot one — usually reckoned somewhere in the 400-450F range, hot enough that a custard-bound cake mixture of that depth may curdle at the edges before the centre sets. Treat it as 350F and bake until just firm.
- Old measuresA wineglassful is about 2 fluid ounces (1/4 cup). A teacupful in this period is roughly 3/4 cup, not a full measuring cup. Four ounces of butter is one stick; four ounces of sugar is about half a cup; a pound of jam is a scant 1 1/2 cups.
- The nutmeg in the baked rice pudding is an error"Two ounces of grated nutmeg" would be roughly half a cup of ground spice and is inedible. The surrounding recipes call only for "a little grated nutmeg," and since this pudding is otherwise unsweetened the line may have lost the word sugar in printing. Use two ounces of sugar and nutmeg to taste.
- Boiling cream for half an hourThe ratafia pudding directs a quart of cream boiled thirty minutes with crushed sponge cake. Modern cream scorches and the sugars in the cake catch; hold it at a bare simmer, stirring, and stop when the crumbs have swelled into a thick porridge — ten to fifteen minutes is usually enough.
- Sponge cake and breadcrumbsBoth puddings depend on dry, stale crumb, not fresh. Fresh breadcrumbs collapse into paste in the layered raspberry pudding; dry them in a low oven first. "Dry sponge-cakes" means day-old plain sponge or ladyfingers, unfrosted.
- Suet in the boiled rice puddingBeef suet is sold by butchers and some online grocers; it must be the hard kidney fat, chopped or grated fine while cold, not rendered tallow. Chilled unsalted butter, grated, is the usual stand-in and gives a lighter, less traditional set.
- Boiling in a clothFor the boiled pudding, butter the basin, cover it with a floured cloth or a pleated round of parchment under foil, and tie it under the rim so no water enters. Stand it on a trivet or folded towel in the pan, keep the water at a steady simmer halfway up the basin, and top up with boiling water as it drops over the two hours.
- Yield and servingThe raspberry pudding fills a mould of about 1 1/2 to 2 quarts and serves six to eight; the ratafia mixture goes into a pie-dish and the baked rice into cups, so the sizes vary. Turn the raspberry pudding out only after ten minutes' rest or the layers slump; the baked rice pudding, portioned into cups, is served hot with a warm wine sauce.
Oscar Tschirky's collection appeared in 1896, and reads less as a Waldorf house manual than as a compendium of what a well-trained kitchen of the 1890s was expected to know; the puddings here are English in character — layered jam and breadcrumb puddings, suet-bound boiled rice, and the ratafia pudding. Ratafia originally meant a sweetened cordial flavoured with almond or fruit kernels; by the nineteenth century the word had also attached to the small almond biscuits made to accompany it, and thence to dishes carrying that almond note, which is why this version leans on blanched sweet almonds and sponge cake rather than on a liqueur. The reliance on crumbs and stale cake is worth noticing, and the boiled version — a basin, a cloth and a pot of water — needed no oven at all.