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Economical Pudding
Break two eggs into a bowl, add two ounces granulated sugar and briskly beat for five minutes; add one and a half ounces flour and half teaspoon baking powder; beat up to a light batter; add one teaspoon vanilla essence and mix well. Lightly butter six individual pudding moulds, then fill them with the batter and place in a pastry tin. Drop in boiling water up to half the height of the moulds and bake in the oven for ten minutes. Remove, unmould on a hot dish, pour a Sabayon sauce over them and serve.
This is a small genoise-type batter — eggs, sugar, a little flour, no fat and no liquid — baked in individual moulds in a water bath. The whole thing lives or dies on how much air you beat into the eggs.
- Beat to the ribbonFive minutes of brisk beating with eggs and sugar means the pale, thick stage that falls from the whisk in a ribbon and holds a trail for a second or two. The half teaspoon of baking powder gives some help, but most of the lift comes from the foam, so if it is slack the puddings will bake dense and rubbery. By hand, expect to need longer than five minutes.
- Fold, do not beat, the flourThe instruction to "beat up to a light batter" after adding flour will knock the air straight out. Sift the flour and baking powder over the foam and fold it in with a spatula in as few strokes as will incorporate it.
- Weights in modern termsTwo ounces granulated sugar is a scant 1/3 cup; one and a half ounces flour is about 1/3 cup of all-purpose, scant. Weigh if you can — at these small quantities a heavy cup of flour throws the ratio off noticeably.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the recipe uses no oven-heat term at all. Around 350F suits a ten-minute bake for small moulds. The puddings are done when the tops spring back and the sides have just begun to shrink from the mould.
- The moulds and the "pastry tin"Individual pudding moulds means dariole moulds or small metal cups of roughly 4 fl oz; ramekins work, though they bake a touch slower. The pastry tin is simply a shallow baking pan to hold the water — a quarter sheet pan or roasting tin. Butter the moulds well and dust them with sugar or flour so they turn out cleanly.
- Water bath, not steamingBoiling water poured to half the height of the moulds keeps the outsides from setting hard before the centres rise. Pour it in after the pan is on the oven shelf rather than carrying a full tray across the kitchen.
- Sabayon is a second recipeThe sauce is assumed knowledge: egg yolks, sugar and wine or Marsala whisked over barely simmering water until thick and foamy. Make it while the puddings bake and serve at once — it collapses on standing, and it must not get hot enough to scramble.
- YieldSix very small puddings, one per person as a light dessert. Serve immediately; a fatless sponge of this kind is dry within an hour.
"Economical" here refers to the ingredient list rather than the labour: two eggs and an ounce and a half of flour, with no butter, cream, suet or breadcrumbs, stretch into six servings on the strength of beaten air and half a teaspoon of baking powder. That makes this a scaled-down cousin of the French biscuit or genoise batter, the same foam-leavened family of mixtures used for everything from sponge fingers to layer cakes, here poured into darioles and baked au bain-marie so it stays tender. Naming a sauce — Sabayon, the French form of Italian zabaglione — without giving its recipe suggests a compiler who expected the reader to know it already.