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Sponge-cake Porcupine
Cut as large squares as possible from stale sponge-cake. Place in pudding-dish, moisten with sweetened orange-juice. Blanch almonds and press into cake, sharp ends up. Prepare soft custard (see page 202) and pour over all.
An assembly job rather than a cooking one: the only real technique is the soft custard, and the only real trick is keeping the almond spines dry so the thing still looks like a porcupine.
- Pour around, not overThe recipe says to pour the custard over all, but you may prefer to ladle it into the dish around and between the cake blocks instead, so the almond spines stay above the surface; almonds sitting under custard lose their point and the porcupine effect with it.
- Soft custardThe "soft custard" of this period is a stirred pouring custard — roughly 2 cups milk or thin cream, 4 egg yolks, 4 tablespoons sugar, cooked over low heat or a double boiler until it coats the back of a spoon, about 170–175°F. It must not reach a simmer or the yolks will curdle. Strain it and cool it before pouring.
- Blanching almondsWhole raw almonds, covered with boiling water for a minute, then slipped out of their skins between finger and thumb. Split each lengthwise if you want more spines and a sharper point. Modern slivered almonds are cut too blunt and too short to stand up.
- Stale cake is the pointFresh sponge breaks up once juice hits it. Day-old or two-day-old cake holds its cut edges and absorbs without collapsing. The recipe asks for squares as large as the cake allows, so cut them big enough to stand proud of the custard.
- The orange juiceSweeten to taste — a tablespoon or two of sugar per cup of juice is plenty, since the custard is already sweet. Moisten, do not soak: the cake should be damp through, not swimming, or the squares will slump.
- Yield and servingA quart pudding-dish of cake and about two cups of custard serves four to six. Chill an hour before serving and eat the same day; the almonds soften overnight and the custard weeps.
Shaping a soft pudding into a bristling animal is an old English trick — hedgehog puddings and hedgehog creams turn up in nineteenth-century cookbooks, the spines usually made of blanched almonds stuck point-outward into a mound of cake, custard or almond paste. This version belongs to the trifle family: stale sponge, a moistening liquid, a poured custard. What suggests a frugal premise is that the sponge is stale by assumption, and the orange juice and almonds are there to make yesterday's cake worth putting on a table again. Presentation was, on this way of thinking, the cheapest ingredient available, and a dish given a shape and a name stopped being a remnant and became a dessert.