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Cold Peach Pudding
Peel twelve good-sized, sound, fresh peaches, cut from the stones in quarter-inch slices, place in a bowl, add six ounces remnants of cakes or bread cut in quarter-inch square, two ounces well-picked currants, and gently mix. Lightly butter and sugar a quart pudding mould, and place in these articles. Crack four fresh eggs in a bowl, add four ounces sugar, two tablespoons kirsch or maraschino and a half teaspoon vanilla. Sharply whisk, then gradually pour in a pint cold milk and a gill cream, whisk for two minutes, and pour it into the pudding mould. Place mould in a saucepan with hot water up to half its height. Set in oven forty minutes. Remove, place mould in a basin with cold water and ice up to half its height and let get thoroughly cold. Unmould on a cold dish. Pour a sweet mousseline sauce over and serve.
A baked custard set with stale cake and fruit, chilled and turned out — essentially a cabinet pudding in peach season. The custard is the whole dish, so treat it as a custard first and a pudding second.
- The hinge: gentle heatNo temperature is given; a moderate oven, around 325F, suits a water bath. Too high a heat and the egg mixture is liable to curdle and weep, and a wept custard will not unmould cleanly. The pudding is done when the centre is just set with a slight wobble, about 170-175F internally — likely at or a little past the stated forty minutes for a full quart mould.
- A gillHalf a cup, so the liquid is 2 cups milk to 1/2 cup cream against 4 eggs. That is a soft, spoonable set rather than a firm one.
- Cake or bread remnantsSix ounces is roughly two to three cups of 1/4-inch cubes, depending on the cake. Use dry, plain cake — pound cake, sponge, leftover ladyfingers — or a firm white bread. Fresh, soft crumb collapses into paste.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. Plump them briefly in warm water or a little of the kirsch and drain before mixing.
- Kirsch or maraschinoBoth are still made. Period maraschino was a distilled liqueur made from marasca cherries and their pits, nothing like the syrup from a jar of bright red cherries; buy a proper Luxardo-style bottling or use kirsch.
- The mouldA quart charlotte mould, pudding basin or a 1-quart metal bowl all work. Butter and sugar it as directed — the buttered, sugared surface helps the custard release. Line the saucepan with a folded cloth so the mould does not rattle or sit on direct heat.
- Chilling and unmouldingThe ice-water bath stops the cooking and is what the recipe relies on to bring the pudding thoroughly cold before turning out; if it is still slack, give it further time in the refrigerator. Dip the mould briefly in warm water and run a thin knife round the edge if it resists.
- Mousseline sauceA sweet mousseline of this period is a sabayon-type sauce — egg yolks and sugar whisked warm, lightened with whipped cream. Any sabayon or crème anglaise lightened with cream serves the same purpose.
- YieldA quart mould gives six modest servings.
This belongs to the family of moulded cake-and-custard puddings that nineteenth-century kitchens called cabinet or diplomat pudding, built on the plain economy of using up "remnants of cakes or bread" rather than throwing them out. The recipe comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906); Filippini had spent years at Delmonico's in New York, and the book's habit of specifying ounces of stale cake and a gill of cream may well reflect a professional kitchen's assumption that nothing edible is wasted and everything is weighed. Serving the pudding cold, iced down in a basin before turning out, presumably suggests a well-equipped household — reliable ice made chilled desserts a summer commonplace in American cities by this date, and peaches, cheap and abundant in season, were the obvious fruit to put in one.