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Vanilla Pudding
Place a vanilla bean in a mortar together with one-half pound of sugar, pound well together, then sift. Separate the yolks from the whites of nine eggs, beat the yolks well, stir them in with one quart of cream, and then mix in the vanilla sugar. Whisk the whites of the eggs to a stiff broth, and mix them in lightly with the other ingredients. Butter the interior of a pudding-mould, pour in the mixture, and cover with a sheet of paper. Stand the mould in a saucepan of boiling water, and steam the pudding for a little less than an hour. In the meantime prepare the following sauce for the pudding: Pour one breakfast cupful of either canned or fresh pineapple juice into a small lined saucepan with the juice of one lemon. Put the pan over the fire until the contents are boiling, then pour it gradually over one tablespoonful of arrowroot, stirring it at the same time; return the sauce to the saucepan, and stir it over the fire until thickened. When cooked turn the pudding out of the mould onto a hot dish, strain the juice over it, and serve. Care must be taken that the water does not enter into the top of the mould, while the pudding is cooking, or it will be spoiled.
A steamed custard set with nothing but eggs and cream, so the hinge is heat control: the water under the mould must stay at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil, or the custard curdles and weeps.
- Water at a simmer, not a boilDespite the instruction to stand the mould in boiling water, bring it to the boil and then drop the heat so the water barely trembles. Fill to about halfway up the mould and top up with hot water as it evaporates.
- "Stiff broth"A printer's slip for stiff froth. The whites go to soft-to-medium peaks and are folded in; beaten to dry, stiff peaks they will not fold through a quart of cream without deflating in lumps.
- Vanilla sugarHalf a pound of sugar is a generous cup. Split the bean, then pulse bean and sugar in a spice grinder or food processor and sift out the fibres, which is what the mortar and sieve were for. Two teaspoons of vanilla extract will flavour it but leaves the sugar volume unchanged.
- The paper coverA buttered round of parchment, or foil, tied or crimped over the rim. Its job is to keep condensation off the surface as much as to keep water out, which is the warning the recipe ends on.
- Breakfast cupfulLarger than a modern measuring cup, though the breakfast cup was never a standardised measure; it is generally reckoned at somewhere between 8 and 12 fl oz. Take it as one cup of pineapple juice; the lemon adds another two tablespoons or so.
- ArrowrootOne tablespoon thickens a cup of juice to a light coating sauce and sets clear. Do not boil it hard once thickened or it thins again; cornstarch behaves similarly but goes cloudy.
- Fresh pineapple juiceRaw pineapple contains bromelain, which attacks the proteins in a custard. Bringing the juice to the boil as directed deactivates it, so do not skip that step and pour raw juice over the pudding.
- Doneness and timingTest at 45 minutes: the centre should be just set with a slight wobble, around 175-180F. Let it stand five minutes before turning out.
- YieldA quart of cream and nine eggs makes a substantial pudding, eight to ten servings.
Steamed moulded puddings were a mainstay of the nineteenth-century dessert course. What dates this version is the pineapple sauce: canned pineapple was reaching American cities in quantity by the 1890s -- chiefly from the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, since large-scale Hawaiian canning only developed after 1900 -- and it is offered here as an equal alternative to fresh without comment. The vanilla bean pounded with sugar in a mortar is the older method, from a time when extract was of unreliable quality; vanilla sugar survives in French pastry work. Arrowroot, imported from the West Indies, was preferred to cornstarch for fruit sauces because it thickens at a lower temperature and stays translucent.