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Sponge-Cake Pudding
Soak half a dozen sponge-cakes in new milk; beat four eggs with a pint of cream; then pour them over the cakes and beat all well together. Sweeten to taste with powdered sugar and add a few drops of essence of vanilla or lemon; ornament the interior of a mould with crystalized cherries and orange chips and pour in the mixture. Pack the mould in pounded ice and leave it for an hour or two. When ready to serve, dip the mould into warm water, wipe it and turn the contents onto a fancy dish.
This is an uncooked custard: raw eggs and cream are beaten together, chilled in ice, and turned out to be eaten as they are. That is the problem, and it is not a small one.
- The eggs are never cookedNothing in this recipe brings the mixture above refrigerator temperature. A pint of cream and four raw eggs held at ice temperature for an hour or two, then unmoulded and served, is a raw-egg dish eaten by the spoonful. Salmonella in shell eggs is the specific risk, and chilling does not reduce it.</p>
- "New milk" compounds itNew milk meant milk fresh from the cow, unpasteurised, which is what the soaking step assumes. Raw milk carries its own load of Salmonella, Campylobacter, Listeria and Shiga-toxin E. coli, none of it addressed anywhere in the method.
- Ice without salt is not a freezerPounded ice packed around a mould, with no rock salt in the pack, cannot bring the contents below about 32F. The mixture is not frozen and not set, only cold -- and cold alone does not make a raw-egg, raw-milk mixture safe.
- Nothing sets itThere is no gelatine, no cooked custard base and no true freezing, so the only structure comes from soaked cake crumb. Turned out of the mould it would be expected to slump. Whatever success it had presumably depended on very cold ice, very fresh eggs and prompt service.
- The buffet intervalDipping the mould in warm water to release it, then wiping and plating on a "fancy dish" for the table, adds further warming and standing time to a dish that was never safe to hold in the first place.
- If you want the dishA modern chilled sponge-cake pudding or charlotte is built on a cooked custard, or on pasteurised eggs, and is set with gelatine. Use a current recipe rather than adapting this one.
- On the sponge-cakes"Half a dozen sponge-cakes" most likely means small individual sponge fingers or moulded sponge buns of the period rather than six layer cakes, so the quantity of cake involved is modest. Read the original as a period document on that point, not as a shopping list.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection records the repertoire of a large American hotel kitchen, and this belongs to a family of moulded, iced sponge puddings that appeared in the cold-sweet section of nineteenth-century menus alongside cabinet pudding and pudding à la diplomate. Such dishes were a convenient use for sponge-cake already on hand, though the recipe itself says nothing about that. The decorated interior of the mould — crystallised cherries and candied orange chips pressed against the metal so they appear on the outside when turned out — was a common confectioner's device of the period, and the method relies on pounded ice rather than mechanical refrigeration.