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Cherry Pudding
Cut into dice pieces four ounces sandwich bread and place it in a bowl; add two gills lukewarm milk, mix well; then press the bread between the hands to suppress the milk. Replace the bread in the same bowl with one ounce good butter, a saltspoon salt, three whole eggs, three ounces candied cherries cut in quarters, one teaspoon vanilla essence and four tablespoons cream; mix all well together with a wooden spoon for five minutes.
Lightly butter six individual pudding moulds, sprinkle their interior with a little flour, then fill with the preparation. Place them in a pastry tin with hot water up to half their height and set in moderate oven for twenty minutes. Remove, unmould on a hot dish, pour a vanilla Sabayon over and send to the table.
A steadied bread-and-egg pudding baked in a water bath — essentially six small individual bread puddings enriched enough to unmould cleanly. Nothing here is difficult, but the measures and the vessels need translating.
- Two gills of milkA gill is half a cup, so this is one cup of lukewarm milk, used only to soften the bread before it is squeezed out. Most of it goes down the drain; the milk is a soaking medium, not a quantity in the finished batter.
- Sandwich breadPlain white sandwich loaf, crusts on or off as you like. Four ounces is roughly four slices. Modern soft supermarket bread turns to paste when soaked, so a firmer white loaf holds its structure better.
- Press out the milk properlyThis is the hinge. If the bread is left sodden the puddings will not set firmly enough to turn out, and they weep in the mould. Squeeze until the bread is damp and crumbly, not dripping.
- Moderate ovenConventionally about 350°F, though 'moderate' is usually given as a range of roughly 350–375°F. Twenty minutes suits small moulds; the puddings are done when the centres are just set and a skewer comes out clean.
- Individual pudding mouldsDariole moulds, or 5–6 oz ramekins. Butter and flour them as directed — the flour coating is what lets a soft egg pudding release. Let them stand two or three minutes out of the water before unmoulding.
- Water bathThe "pastry tin" is a roasting pan; fill with hot water to halfway up the moulds, as the recipe directs, and top up if it drops.
- Candied cherriesGlacé cherries, the firm sugared kind, not maraschino cherries in syrup, which are far wetter and will bleed pink through the batter. Three ounces is roughly half a cup once quartered.
- Vanilla sabayonAn egg-yolk sauce whisked over hot water with sugar and, in the French manner, usually a little wine or spirit — here flavoured with vanilla. It must be whisked constantly off direct heat and served immediately; it separates as it cools.
- YieldSix small puddings, one per person, as a dessert course.
This is a hotel-kitchen version of an old idea: bread, milk and eggs baked into a pudding. What marks it as professional French-influenced cooking — the measures and vocabulary, gills and saltspoons, point to around the turn of the twentieth century — is the treatment: individual moulds, a bain-marie rather than a single dish, candied fruit instead of raisins, and a sabayon poured over at the pass. Sabayon is the French form of the Italian zabaglione, generally traced to northern Italy and carried into French restaurant practice as a warm sauce for puddings and fruit.