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Madeira Pudding (II)
Mrs. J. H. Mead.
Four eggs, four tablespoons butter, sugar and flour; beat all very light and then add flavouring; bake in small cups in a quick oven ; serve immediately; with sauce.
A four-egg batter with only four tablespoons of flour behaves like a soufflé rather than a cake, and everything about the method follows from that.
- Reading the ingredient line"Four tablespoons butter, sugar and flour" means four tablespoons of each — roughly 2 oz butter, 50 g sugar and 30 g flour. That is an extremely low proportion of flour to four whole eggs, which is deliberate.
- The hinge: air is the only leavenerThere is no baking powder here, so whatever lift the puddings get comes from the beating. The book says only "beat all very light"; if you prefer to work it as a soufflé-type batter, beat the eggs and sugar until pale and much increased in volume, then fold in the flour and the softened or barely melted butter. Either way, deflation at this stage means the puddings will not rise.
- "A quick oven"Conventionally glossed as somewhere around 400–425°F; the book gives no temperature. Small cups at that heat should take roughly 12–15 minutes; they are done when puffed, set at the centre and just coloured.
- Small cupsButtered and sugared china custard cups or ramekins of 4–6 oz, filled about two-thirds. Stand them on a baking sheet for easy handling.
- FlavouringFor a pudding of this name, a tablespoon of Madeira, or a teaspoon of lemon zest or vanilla. The book assumes the cook has a flavouring bottle to hand and names none.
- Serve immediately means itThese fall within a few minutes of leaving the oven, like a hot soufflé. Have the sauce made and the table waiting before you bake.
- The sauceUnspecified here. A wine sauce (Madeira or sherry thickened with butter and sugar), a hard sauce, or a plain custard all suit.
- YieldAbout six small cups; four to six servings.
The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled "from recipes contributed by ladies of Toronto and other cities and towns," and is generally traced as one of the earliest Canadian community fundraising cookbooks, sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children. Its recipes are attributed by name, as this one is to Mrs. J. H. Mead, and they read like notes passed between cooks who already knew what they were doing — no oven temperature, no flavouring named, no yield. "Madeira" here may point to the fortified wine, though the recipe names no flavouring at all and the inference rests on the title alone; Madeira cake in Britain is often said to take its name not from any ingredient but from the wine served alongside it, and the same loose association attaches to puddings of this type. Two Madeira puddings appear in the book.}