No. 3108

Scotch Pudding

Pouding a l'Ecossaise

Soften twelve ounces of beef marrow at the oven door, without letting it melt. Pass it through a strainer and lay it in a bowl to beat to a cream, adding to it one by one ten egg-yolks, two whole eggs, also a pinch of salt, then put in fourteen ounces of bread-crumbs soaked in milk, two ounces of candied cherries cut in two, four ounces of candied orange and lemon peel cut in small three-sixteenth inch squares and half a gill of rum; lastly mix in ten egg-whites, beaten to a very stiff froth. Transfer this preparation into a buttered and sugared dome-shaped mold with a tube in its center; set it into a saucepan with water reaching to half its height, and place the saucepan on the fire for the water to come to a boil, then finish cooking in the oven for forty minutes. As soon as the pudding is done unmold it on a dish and cover over with apricot marmalade (No. 3675) diluted with a little Madeira wine; serve with a sauce-boatful of sauce or punch made as follows: Put in a saucepan a gill and a half of brandy, a gill and a half of rum, a gill of vanilla syrup, the peel of a lemon and of an orange and a small bit of cinnamon. Just when ready to serve heat without boiling and then set it on the fire for a few seconds to burn out the alcohol; cover the saucepan at once to extinguish the fire, and serve.

← No. 3107 Saxony Pudding—Souffled Hot Entremets — Puddings, Fritters & Soufflés No. 3109 Schiller Pudding →

For the Modern Kitchen

A rich Victorian marrow pudding, steamed in a bain-marie and finished in the oven. Nothing in it is unsafe, but almost every material detail — the fat, the mold, the units — needs translating.

Beef marrow, and how to get 12 ozAsk a butcher for split marrow bones; you need roughly 4 to 5 lb of bones to yield 12 ounces of marrow. Push the softened marrow through a fine sieve as directed — it removes the membrane and blood specks that would otherwise show as grey streaks in a pale pudding.
"Soften at the oven door"The oven door was simply the warm spot used to soften the marrow without melting it; no temperature is recorded. Set the marrow in a bowl over barely warm water, or in an oven turned off with the light on, until it is the texture of soft butter. If it melts it will not cream with the yolks and the fat will separate out in cooking.
A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. So half a gill of rum in the batter is 2 fl oz (1/4 cup); the punch takes a gill and a half each of brandy and rum, that is 6 fl oz (3/4 cup) apiece, plus a gill (1/2 cup) of vanilla syrup.
BreadcrumbsThe recipe does not say whether the fourteen ounces is weighed before or after soaking; read as the dry weight of soft crumbs from a day-old white loaf, rather than dried commercial crumbs, which absorb far more milk and set up like paste. Soak in just enough milk to saturate, then press out the excess before adding.
The moldA dome-shaped mold with a central tube is a Turk's-head style mold; a 2 1/2 to 3 quart Bundt or kugelhopf pan works. Butter it and dust with granulated sugar, which gives the crust its faint caramel shell and helps it release. Fill no more than three-quarters full -- the ten whites give it real lift.
Bain-marie, then ovenBring the water in the saucepan to a boil on the stovetop to set the outside, then transfer pan and all to the oven for the stated forty minutes. No temperature is given in the original; around 350F suits. Keep the water at half the mold's height and top it up with boiling water if it drops. A skewer into the thickest part should come out clean.
UnmoldingThe recipe says to unmold as soon as it is done; if you prefer, let it stand 5 to 10 minutes off the heat first, since straight from the water it is fragile. Loosen the tube with a knife tip.
The punchHeat it without boiling, then light it and cover the pan at once — the point is to burn off the raw spirit, not to reduce the syrup. Do it away from the range hood and any open bottles, and use a long match.
YieldTwelve eggs' worth of batter in a 3-quart mold serves 10 to 12 as written. It is very rich; small wedges with the apricot glaze and a spoonful of punch are the intended proportion.

A Little History

The name means simply Scottish-style: pouding à l'écossaise. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894, gives dozens of these numbered puddings in sequence — Saxony, Scotch, Schiller — as interchangeable dessert entremets for a long service. Beef marrow, rather than the suet of the English original, may well be the mark of the professional kitchen: it was a by-product of breaking down bones for stock, it is milder and more delicate than suet, and it was already the classic enrichment for marrow dumplings and for the marrow forcemeats served on toast. Candied cherries and citrus peel, imported and expensive, plausibly signalled the same thing a flaming brandy-and-rum punch did at table — that this was a restaurant dish, not a nursery one.