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Cold Maraschino Pudding
Cut in small squares four ounces stale cakes or bread remnants, two fresh or preserved seeded pears, two fresh or preserved seeded peaches, two preserved apricots, a half pint stoned fresh or maraschino cherries, one ounce well-picked dried currants and mix all together. Lightly butter and sugar a quart pudding mould, place above preparation in it. Place three fresh eggs and yolks of two in a bowl, adding four ounces powdered sugar, briskly stir with whisk, then add a pint milk, two gills cream, a half gill maraschino, mix briskly with whisk for two minutes. Strain sauce through a Chinese strainer into the pudding mould, place in a saucepan, pour hot water in pan up to half the height of mould and set in oven to bake for forty-five minutes. Remove, lay mould on ice and let thoroughly cool off. Prepare a Sabayon sauce, let get cold, then mix in two gills vanilla whipped cream and two tablespoons maraschino, unmould pudding on a cold dish, pour sauce over and serve.
A cabinet-pudding formula dressed up with liqueur: stale cake and fruit bound in a baked custard, chilled in the mould, then sauced. The custard is the whole game, and it wants a low oven and a genuine water bath.
- The hinge: keep the oven lowThe original says only "set in oven." A moderate oven, around 325F, suits a custard in a water bath; a hotter oven risks curdling the edges before the centre sets. It is done when the centre reaches about 170F and wobbles as a mass rather than sloshing.
- Gills and pintsA gill is half a cup, so two gills cream is 1 cup and a half gill maraschino is 1/4 cup. The pint of milk is a US pint, 2 cups. That is 3 1/4 cups of liquid before the eggs, which is generous for a quart mould -- use a 6-cup mould, or fill the quart mould and bake the surplus custard in a ramekin alongside.
- Maraschino means the liqueurNot the neon-red cocktail cherry. Maraschino is a clear, dry cherry liqueur distilled from marasca cherries with their kernels (Luxardo is the standard bottle); "maraschino cherries" in this period meant fruit steeped in it. Fresh or good jarred amarena cherries, drained, are the closest thing now.
- Chinese strainerA chinois -- the conical fine-mesh sieve. Any fine strainer does the job; the point is to catch the chalazae and any thread of set egg before the custard goes over the fruit.
- Butter and sugar the mould properlyButter cold, then dust with granulated sugar and tap out the excess. The sugar layer caramelises faintly and helps the pudding release cleanly. Chill the mould thoroughly before filling.
- Sabayon sauceThe book assumes you know it: yolks, sugar and a white wine or marsala whisked over barely simmering water until thick and holding ribbons. Take it to 165F for safety, then cool it fully before folding in the whipped cream, or the cream will slacken.
- UnmouldingChill at least four hours, ideally overnight. Dip the mould in hot water for ten seconds, run a thin knife round the rim, and invert onto a cold plate. Sauce it at the table -- the sabayon cream loosens quickly.
- YieldNo yield is given; a quart mould will serve about six, seven at a stretch. It is rich enough that small portions are the right portions.
This is a cabinet pudding -- a form closely related to diplomat pudding, though the latter is often the unbaked, cream-set version -- the standard nineteenth-century way of turning leftover sponge cake and preserved fruit into a company dessert, here perfumed with maraschino. The liqueur takes its name from the marasca, a small sour cherry of the Dalmatian coast; distillation of it around Zara (now Zadar) is often traced to sixteenth-century Dominican monks, with the Luxardo house, founded there by Girolamo Luxardo in 1821, becoming the best-known producer. Filippini's book reflects the Delmonico's kitchen he came out of, where French technique and imported bottles were the mark of a good table, and where a moulded custard chilled "on ice" was still a small display of a restaurant's resources: ice, cream, out-of-season preserved apricots and a European liqueur in one dish. The instruction to use "stale cakes or bread remnants" sits oddly beside all that, and is the honest part of the recipe -- thrift was the origin of the form, whatever was poured over it.