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Farina Pudding
Boil a pint of milk in a saucepan, gradually add one ounce farina, being careful to continually mix with a wooden spoon while adding it, and cook for ten minutes, frequently stirring once in a while; take from the fire, add three ounces powdered sugar, one teaspoon vanilla essence, two tablespoons well-picked currants and three egg yolks; mix for two minutes. Sharply beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, then add and gently mix with the preparation. Lightly butter and sugar six small pudding moulds, fill them with the preparation, place in a roasting tin with hot water up to half their height; set in the oven and bake for thirty minutes. Remove, unmould on a hot dish; pour a Sabayon sauce over them and serve.
A semolina custard baked in a water bath — closer to a French pouding de semoule than to American cream of wheat. The recipe gives no oven temperature and assumes you know what a pudding mould is.
- FarinaMilled wheat middlings — what is sold as semolina, cream of wheat or farina cereal. Use the plain quick-cooking kind, not instant flavoured packets. One ounce is about 3 tablespoons.
- MeasuresA pint of milk is 2 cups; 3 ounces of sugar is a scant half cup. "Powdered sugar" in a book of this period usually means finely ground granulated sugar rather than modern confectioners' sugar, which carries cornstarch — either will work here.
- OvenNone is stated. A custard in a bain-marie wants 325–350F; higher and the egg sets coarse and weeps.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. "Well-picked" means going through them for stems and grit, still worth doing.
- The mouldsSix small pudding or dariole moulds of roughly 4 oz (½ cup) each. Buttering and sugaring gives the crust that lets them slide out; ramekins work if you accept a squatter shape.
- Adding the farinaIt goes into boiling milk in a thin stream with constant stirring. Dumped in at once it lumps immediately and no amount of beating recovers it.
- Folding the whitesAdding the yolks to a very hot base risks scrambling them, though the recipe itself puts them in straight off the fire; let it cool further before the whites, or they deflate. "Gently mix" is the operative phrase.
- Sabayon sauceEgg yolks, sugar and wine whisked over barely simmering water until thick and foamy; marsala is traditional in the Italian version. It must be made at the last minute and served at once.
- YieldSix individual puddings; a dessert course for six.
Farina and semolina puddings run through European household cooking of the nineteenth century as a way of turning a little milk and a spoonful of grain into a dish that eats like a custard. This one belongs to the French side of that tradition: cooked in buttered moulds in a water bath, turned out, and flooded with sabayon — the French rendering of Italian zabaglione, the whipped wine-and-yolk foam generally traced to Piedmont. The reliance on a starch-thickened base, with only three yolks doing the enriching, marks it as an economical dessert rather than a grand one.