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Sweets and Cakes (No Bodino of Semolina)
No. 211. Bodino of Semolina Ingredients: Semolina, milk, eggs, castor sugar, lemon, sultanas, rum, butter, cream, or Zabajone (No. 222).
Boil one and a half pint of milk with four ounces of castor sugar, and gradually add five ounces of semolina, boil for a quarter of an hour more and stir continually with a wooden spoon, then take the saucepan off the fire, and when it is cooled a little, add the yolks of six and the whites of two eggs well beaten up, a little grated lemon peel, three-quarters of an ounce of sultanas and two small glasses of rum. Mix well, so as to get it very smooth, pour it into a buttered mould and serve either hot or cold. If cold, put whipped cream flavoured with stick vanilla round the dish; if hot, a Zabajone (No. 222). round it.
A semolina pudding in the Italian style, thickened on the stove and enriched with egg yolks. The single problem with the text is that it never tells you to set the pudding after moulding it.
- The missing stepThe text stops at the mould -- it never tells you to set or bake the pudding. In practice the mixture is still very hot when the eggs go in, so they will largely cook from residual heat, and a paste this stiff (five ounces of semolina to a pint and a half of milk) will hold its shape on cooling. If you want it firmer and drier, treat it as a baked custard-pudding: set the filled mould in a bain-marie in a moderate oven until the centre is just firm, roughly 45-60 minutes for a 1.5-quart mould, or steam it covered for about the same time. The book gives no oven instruction, so any temperature is the cook's choice.
- Semolina, not semolina flour substitutesUse coarse or medium durum semolina (semolino), the same grain sold for gnocchi alla romana. Fine-ground semolina flour will thicken faster and give a pastier texture; cream of wheat is closer than pasta flour but softer.
- MeasuresOne and a half imperial pints is about 30 fl oz, or 850 ml. Four ounces of castor sugar is roughly half a cup of superfine sugar; five ounces of semolina is a scant cup. Castor sugar is simply superfine granulated.
- The sultanas look wrongThe sultanas are sparse -- Three-quarters of an ounce is about two tablespoons, barely a scatter through this quantity of pudding. There is nothing in the text to say it is an error, and no larger figure can be recovered from it; if you want them to register, plump 3 oz in a little of the rum first.
- "Two small glasses of rum"Period small glasses ran from about a liqueur glass (1 fl oz) to a sherry or wine glass (commonly reckoned 2 fl oz), so read this as somewhere between 2 and 4 fl oz in total. It is a lot of liquid to add to a set pudding; start at the lower end, and note that baking will drive off some of the alcohol.
- Stirring and lumpsRain the semolina into the boiling milk in a slow stream and keep the wooden spoon moving. The full quarter-hour of cooking after the grain is in is not padding; undercooked semolina tastes raw and chalky no matter how long the pudding then bakes.
- Cooling before the eggsLet the pan stand until the mixture is hot rather than scalding, around 160-170F, before beating in the yolks, or they will scramble in threads. Beating a spoonful of the hot semolina into the eggs first is the surer route.
- ServingThe quantities make 6 to 8 servings. Cold, the whipped cream is scraped-vanilla or vanilla-infused rather than extract; hot, the zabaglione of No. 222 is poured around the base of the turned-out pudding, not over it.
Bodino is the book's spelling of budino, the Italian word for a moulded pudding, itself generally traced back through French boudin to the same root as the English black pudding — a word that once meant anything enclosed in a casing or shape rather than anything sweet. Semolina, the coarse middlings of durum wheat, was long a common thickener in Italian sweet cookery, and a semolina budino sits in that tradition of turning cheap grain, milk and eggs into something worth carrying to the dining room. The Cook's Decameron (1901) was assembled by Mrs W. G. Waters as ten days of Italian dinners framed after Boccaccio, aimed at English households that knew French cookery and almost no Italian; the rum and sultanas here, and the offer of whipped cream as an alternative to zabaglione, may show the collection meeting its readers halfway.