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Strawberry Pudding
Spread a layer of strawberry jam at the bottom of a buttered pie-dish and cover it thickly with breadcrumbs. Beat four eggs with two ounces of powdered sugar, then put them in a sauce pan with one quart of milk, season with a little grated nutmeg and stir over the fire until thick. Pour the above mixture slowly into the pie-dish with the crumbs, put the pudding in a moderate oven and bake it for half an hour. When done, serve either hot or cold.
A plain English baked custard set over jam and crumbs, written for cooks who already knew how custard behaves. The single thing that decides whether it works is how you handle the stovetop stage.
- Do not let the custard boil"Stir over the fire until thick" means cooking eggs and milk to a coating consistency over gentle heat, around 175-180F. A moment of simmering and the eggs curdle into threads that no amount of baking will smooth out. Keep the heat low and pull the pan the instant it thickens enough to film the back of a spoon.
- "Moderate oven"350F. For a custard set in a shallow dish, 325F is safer still and the half hour will stretch a little. It is done when the centre only just trembles.
- Powdered sugarIn 1896 this meant granulated sugar ground fine, closer to today's caster sugar than to modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Two ounces is a generous quarter-cup; caster or ordinary granulated will do.
- Pie-dishA shallow ceramic or glass baking dish. Butter it well, since the jam layer will stick otherwise.
- BreadcrumbsDry crumbs from stale white bread, not the fine sandy commercial kind and not fresh soft crumbs, which collapse. About 1 1/2 to 2 cups gives the "thick" cover the recipe asks for.
- Pouring over the crumbsPour slowly and against the side of the dish, or down the back of a spoon. Dumped in, the custard drives the crumbs up through it and the jam layer streaks.
- A water bath helpsIn a modern oven, setting the dish in a roasting pan with an inch of hot water keeps the edges from setting hard before the middle catches up.
- YieldSix modest servings. Served cold it firms up considerably and slices; hot, it is closer to a spoon pudding.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, published his Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, and much of it is not haute cuisine at all but the broad domestic repertoire an American hotel kitchen was expected to produce on demand. This pudding is squarely in the English tradition of jam-and-breadcrumb baked custards, the same family as queen of puddings and the various "cabinet" and "bread and butter" puddings that used up stale loaf ends and a jar of preserve. Strawberry jam did the work of fresh fruit out of season, and the nutmeg is the standard nineteenth-century seasoning for anything milk-and-egg based, appearing in custard recipes on both sides of the Atlantic with great regularity. Its presence in a Waldorf book is a reminder that a grand hotel dining room served nursery food to homesick guests as readily as it served terrapin.