No. 3094

Mellow Pudding, Apricot Sauce

Pouding Moelleux, Sauce aux Abricots.

Skin half a pound of suet and pass it twice through the machine (Fig. 47); pound it with five ounces of beef marrow and pass it through a sieve; put it into a vessel with fourteen ounces of powdered sugar and beat up for ten minutes with a spoon, then add two whole eggs and from fifteen to eighteen yolks, little by little, five ounces of white bread-crumbs soaked in hot milk and well pressed, pounded and diluted with a little raw cream and then passed through a sieve, and lastly add four or five spoonfuls of brandy, salt, grated lemon peel and one pound of candied fruits cut in quarter-inch squares and ten ounces of Smyrna raisins. Put a little of this preparation in a small timbale mold and poach it in a bain-marie to judge whether its consistency be correct. Butter some plain or cylindrical molds, flour them over and fill them three-quarters full with the preparation; place these molds in a deep baking tin with hot water and poach for one hour in a slack oven. Let stand for ten minutes and then unmold on a dish and cover with apricot and rum sauce (No. 3001). This quantity is sufficient for twenty persons.

← No. 3093 Pudding a la Bradley Hot Entremets — Puddings, Fritters & Soufflés No. 3095 Cabinet Pudding a la Royale →

For the Modern Kitchen

A rich steamed suet-and-marrow pudding from Ranhofer's Delmonico's repertoire, built on an extraordinary number of egg yolks and baked in a water bath rather than boiled in a cloth. It scales to twenty, so most cooks will want a fraction of it.

The test timbale is the hingeRanhofer tells you to poach a spoonful of the mixture in a small mold before committing the whole batch, and that step is not optional. With this much sugar, fat and yolk, the batter can set too soft to unmold or too firm and dense; the trial tells you whether to add a little more crumb or a little more cream.
"Slack oven" and the bain-marieA slack oven is a cool one, conventionally somewhere in the region of 250-300F. The pudding is not baked so much as gently poached: the tin of hot water should stay below a simmer, and the molds are filled only three-quarters full, allowing for a little rise.
The machine at Fig. 47Almost certainly a hand-cranked meat chopper. Pass the suet through twice, as the recipe says, or pulse it in a food processor while very cold; the point is to break it down fine enough to cream smoothly with the sugar.
Suet and beef marrowBeef kidney suet is still sold by butchers and by mail; packaged shredded suet is usually cut with flour, or is a vegetable product altogether, and will behave differently. Marrow means the soft interior of split beef leg bones, roasted or blanched out; a butcher will cut canoe bones on request. Both must be kept cold until they go into the sugar.
Fifteen to eighteen yolksThat is roughly 10-12 oz of yolk for the full batch, added little by little so the fat-and-sugar base does not break. If you quarter the recipe, work in weight rather than counting eggs: about 2.5-3 oz of yolk plus half an egg's worth of white.
Smyrna raisins and candied fruitsSmyrna raisins are the pale seedless Turkish grapes now sold as sultanas or golden raisins. The pound of candied fruit means proper candied peel, cherries and citron cut in quarter-inch dice, not the dyed supermarket fruitcake mix.
The sauceNo. 3001 is Ranhofer's apricot and rum sauce; its composition is not given on this page. Keep it pourable but not thin.
Timing and yieldOne hour suits the small plain or cylindrical molds the recipe specifies; a single large mold of this batter will need longer. Rest ten minutes before unmolding, as the original says, or the pudding will slump. The full quantity serves twenty.

A Little History

Pouding moelleux means simply "mellow" or "soft" pudding, and it belongs to a small family of French entremets that borrowed the English steamed-pudding idea and made it richer. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a working compendium of that restaurant's kitchen, and his puddings chapter is full of these hybrids: English suet and bread-crumb structure, French technique of sieving, poaching in a bain-marie, and finishing with a fruit sauce. Beef marrow in a sweet dish looks strange now but was not unusual in nineteenth-century pastry work; marrow puddings and marrow tarts appear in English cookery books well before this one. The recipe's scale, twenty portions and up to eighteen yolks, is a reminder that these are restaurant instructions rather than household ones.