Home › The World's Kitchen › Date Pudding
Date Pudding
Carefully stone a half pound dates, finely chop with four ounces of fresh beef marrow and place in a bowl, add four ounces sugar, four ounces fresh bread crumbs, two saltspoons salt, a saltspoon grated nutmeg, half gill cold milk, the yolks of three eggs with a teaspoon vanilla essence, and briskly mix for five minutes. Beat up the whites of the three eggs to a froth and gradually add to the bowl, lightly mixing while adding it. Lightly butter and sugar a quart pudding mould, drop in the preparation, lay in a saucepan, and pour hot water up to half the height of the mould. Set in the oven for one hour and twenty-five minutes, remove, unmould on a dish, pour a Sabayon sauce over and serve.
A rich baked marrow pudding of the old English type, cooked in a water bath and served hot under a foaming wine sauce. The original gives no oven temperature and assumes a cook who knows what a saltspoon holds.
- Beef marrowFresh marrow is the whole point of the texture here: it melts at a lower temperature than suet and leaves the crumb moist rather than crumbly. Ask a butcher for marrow bones and scoop the raw marrow out cold, or soak the split bones in cold water an hour to loosen it. Chilled beef suet is the closest substitute; butter works but gives a plainer, cakier result.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of salt is half a teaspoon and the nutmeg is a quarter teaspoon. Half a gill is 2 fl oz on the American reckoning, 2 1/2 fl oz if imperial measure is meant -- roughly a quarter cup either way.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A pudding set in a bain-marie for nearly an hour and a half wants a moderate oven, 325-350F; hotter and the outside sets and cracks before the centre firms.
- The water bathUse hot water, not boiling, and top it up if it falls below halfway. Butter a round of parchment over the mould to stop a skin forming. The pudding is done when a skewer in the centre comes out clean and the mixture has pulled slightly from the sides.
- Mould and yieldA quart mould is 4 cups. Fill it no more than three-quarters full so the whipped whites have room to lift. It should serve about six.
- DatesModern dessert dates, Medjool or Deglet Noor, are usually sold pitted and are considerably moister than the drier pressed dates a cook of this period would have had. They chop more easily if you freeze them for ten minutes first, and they will make the pudding sweeter, so the four ounces of sugar can be reduced without harm.
- Sabayon sauceWhisk egg yolks, sugar and a sweet wine such as Marsala over barely simmering water until thick and foaming. It must never approach a boil or the yolks scramble, and it collapses within minutes, so make it while the pudding rests and pour it at the table.
- UnmouldingLet the pudding stand five to ten minutes out of the water before turning it out. Straight from the oven it is too soft to hold its shape.
Marrow puddings are among the oldest sweet dishes in the English repertoire, going back to the medieval and Tudor habit of enriching sweet mixtures with the fat from beef bones, and dates appear alongside them in early recipes, both being costly and warm-tasting with nutmeg. By the time this book appeared in the early twentieth century, suet was the commoner enrichment in domestic cookery, and this recipe's insistence on fresh marrow reflects a professional rather than a household kitchen. The Sabayon poured over it points to the other half of the dish's ancestry: zabaglione, whisked egg yolks with sweet wine, had by then passed into French and Anglo-American restaurant service as a sauce as well as a dessert in its own right.