No. 3100

Humboldt Pudding

Pouding a la Humboldt

Cook five or six large pancakes; cover them on one side with a layer of apricot marmalade (No. 3675) and cut them up into bands each an inch and a quarter wide and through their entire length. Butter a dome-shaped cylindrical mold and fasten the pancake bands on their uncovered side against the sides of the mold, overlapping each other. Cover the pancake parings with apricot marmalade and roll them into small rolls, then cut them in half-inch long bits. Beat eight ounces of butter to a cream, add to it, one by one, four whole eggs and two whites; when this becomes frothy, put in four ounces of sugar, then four ounces of flour and four ounces of peeled almonds dried and pounded with four ounces of sugar, afterward passed through a sieve. Mix the whole properly and lastly incorporate into it three well-beaten egg-whites. Pour this preparation into the pan-cake-lined mold, alternating it with layers of the small rolls previously prepared; when the mold is full set it in a bain-marie and allow the water to come to a boil on the fire, then cook it in a slack oven for forty-five minutes. As soon as the pudding is done take it out and let it stand for a few moments before unmolding it on a dish, brush it over with hot apricot marmalade and serve with a sauce-boat of apricot sauce. Place two gills of apricot marmalade in a saucepan, diluting it with two gills of syrup; set it on the fire to boil up once, then strain through a fine wire sieve and add two gills of good Madeira wine.

← No. 3099 Pudding a la de Freese Hot Entremets — Puddings, Fritters & Soufflés No. 3101 Italian Pudding →

For the Modern Kitchen

A cabinet-style steamed pudding lined with jam-spread crêpes, baked gently in a water bath. Ranhofer assumes a professional pastry section, so the weights and oven language need translating before you start.

The hinge: gentle, even heatThis is a butter-and-egg batter set in a bain-marie, not a cake. A slack oven is a cool one — somewhere in the region of 275–325F is the usual modern reading — and too much heat risks curdling the batter so that the pudding weeps butter when unmolded. Bring the water bath to a boil on the stovetop first, as directed.
GillsA gill is half a cup. The sauce is therefore 1 cup apricot marmalade, 1 cup syrup and 1 cup Madeira, which makes a generous amount for one pudding.
Pancakes means crêpesRanhofer's pancakes are thin French crêpes, not raised griddle cakes; the recipe calls only for them to be "large." They must be flexible enough to press against the mold and to roll tightly around the marmalade.
Apricot marmaladeHis No. 3675 is an apricot preserve rather than a citrus marmalade. Good apricot preserve pushed through a sieve to remove skin and fibre does the job; it needs to be thick or it will bleed into the batter.
The almond preparationFour ounces of peeled almonds pounded with four ounces of sugar and sieved is period shorthand for a fine almond–sugar powder. Blanched almond flour plus the sugar, pulsed together and sifted, gives the same thing without a mortar.
Weights, not cupsWork by scale: 8 oz (225 g) butter, 4 oz (115 g) sugar in the batter, 4 oz (115 g) flour, plus the 4 oz almonds with a further 4 oz sugar. Converting these to volume throws the batter's balance off.
The eggsFour whole eggs and two whites go in one at a time to the creamed butter; three more whites are whipped and folded in at the end. With no chemical leavening, the aeration from the creaming and the folded whites is all the lift there is, so fold them in and get the mold into the oven promptly.
The moldA dome-shaped cylindrical mold is what would now be sold as a charlotte or pudding mold. Butter it well; chilling it briefly before lining helps stop the crêpe bands sliding.
Doneness and yieldForty-five minutes is the time given; test with a skewer at the center, which should come out clean, and let it settle a few moments, as directed, before turning out. The recipe states no number of servings.

A Little History

The recipe comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium of the cooking he oversaw at Delmonico's in New York, where the standard practice was to name elaborate dishes for statesmen, scientists, singers and regular patrons — the name is generally taken as a nod to Alexander von Humboldt, whose reputation as a naturalist was still very much alive in nineteenth-century America and whose centenary in 1869 was marked with public celebrations in New York. Structurally the pudding belongs to the family of molded cabinet puddings that ran through French and Anglo-American haute cuisine of the period: a lined mold, a rich batter or custard, fruit preserve, a water bath, and a sauce sharpened with fortified wine. The apricot marmalade and Madeira are typical of the era's dessert saucing, when Madeira was a standard pastry-kitchen ingredient rather than a specialty bottle, and the cross-references to numbered recipes elsewhere in the book show that Ranhofer wrote for cooks with a full brigade and a stocked larder behind them.