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Rum Pudding
Pour over one breakfast cupful of breadcrumbs just sufficient rum to moisten them. Beat the yolks of half a dozen eggs with the whites of two add, five table-spoonfuls of granulated sugar, mix them with the soaked breadcrumbs and flavor with the grated peel of a lemon and a small quantity of grated nutmeg. Whisk the whites of four eggs to a stiff froth and mix them with the above ingredients. Butter the interior of a dome-shaped mould, fill it with the mixture, put it into a saucepan of boiling water and steam it for an hour. Care must be taken not to allow the water to enter the mould. When cooked, turn the pudding onto a hot dish, pour one wine-glassful of rum over it, ignite it, and serve it immediately with a sauceboatful of orange sauce. Sago Pudding, Baked Boil the thinly-pared rind of a large lemon in one quart of new milk. Take the lemon peel out of the milk and put in one teacupful of washed sago and three-fourths of a teacupful of sugar. Allow the sago to simmer for twenty minutes, or until tender, then remove it from the fire and leave it to cool. Line a buttered pie-dish with rich puff-paste; mix two ounces of butter and five well-beaten eggs with the sago, turn it into a pie-dish and bake it for one hour in a moderate oven. When cooked, serve the pudding in the same dish.
Two puddings run together in one block of type: a steamed rum pudding finished at the table in flame, and a baked sago custard pie. Both are straightforward once the old cup measures are pinned down.
- Breakfast cup, teacup, wine-glassA breakfast cupful is roughly 8-10 fl oz. A teacupful is nearer 5-6 fl oz, and a wine-glassful is about 2 fl oz of rum for the flaming. The recipe does not say whether the crumbs are soft or dried, so the weight of a cupful will vary considerably.
- Moisten, do not soakThe crumbs want just enough rum to dampen them through, on the order of 4-6 tablespoons for a breakfast cup of crumbs. Drenched crumbs collapse into paste and the pudding will not hold its dome.
- Steaming the mouldButter well, fill no more than three-quarters full, and cover the top with buttered parchment tied down or a lid. Water at a bare, steady simmer reaching halfway up the mould, topped up with more boiling water as it drops; a full hard boil is what drives water past the rim.
- Doneness and turning outAfter an hour a skewer into the centre should come out clean and the pudding should feel set rather than liquid at the middle. Let it stand five minutes before inverting, or the shoulders of the dome tear away.
- Flaming the rumWarm the rum first in a small pan until it is hot but not simmering, then light it away from the bottle and pour it flaming over the pudding, or pour and ignite at the dish. Cold rum will not catch. Keep the bottle well back from the flame and do not lean over the dish.
- SagoPearl sago is starch from the sago palm and is still sold in Asian and South Asian groceries; small pearl tapioca behaves the same way and is the usual substitute. "New milk" is simply fresh whole milk. "Washed" means rinsed to remove loose surface starch.
- Moderate ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; a moderate oven is conventionally read as somewhere in the region of 325-350F. The sago mixture should be cool before the eggs and butter go in, or they will scramble, and a cool filling also keeps the puff paste from turning greasy in the first ten minutes.
- YieldThe rum pudding will roughly fill a mould of about 1 1/2 quarts and the sago pudding a deep pie dish of about 9 inches, though the recipe specifies neither; each should give six or so servings. Both are meant to go straight from mould or dish to the table hot.
Oscar Tschirky's book records the Waldorf's kitchen at the turn of the twentieth century, when the grand hotel dessert list leaned heavily on the English steamed pudding and the French entremets, and a dish that arrived alight was worth its place on the menu for the spectacle alone. Both puddings here are frugal in origin and grand only in presentation: one is a crumb pudding, the household trick for using stale bread, dressed up with rum and a lemon peel; the other is a sago custard, sago having been a standard Victorian invalid and nursery food, imported in quantity from Southeast Asia and generally regarded as gentle on the stomach. Setting them side by side shows how the hotel kitchen worked, taking familiar domestic formulas and raising them with better butter, more eggs, puff paste and a sauceboat of orange sauce.