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Fig Pudding, Tyrolienne
Prepare and cook six pudding only adding four candied or brandied cherries, cut into small square pieces, to each mould before the custard preparation is poured over the pudding, and serve the same way.
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the preceding fig pudding in front of you and changes only one thing. A few points on reading it and on the technique it takes for granted.
- You need the base recipe"Prepare and cook six pudding" refers to the fig pudding immediately before this one in the book. Without that entry there is no fig quantity, no batter, and no custard formula here.
- "Six pudding"Read as six individual puddings, one per mould. Yield is six servings, which the original never states outright.
- The mouldsThe recipe says only "each mould". Small individual moulds of the dariole or timbale type are the likely intention; buttered ramekins of similar capacity behave the same way.
- Candied or brandied cherriesNot the modern brined, dyed cocktail cherry, which carries far more syrup and a different flavour. Use glace cherries or cherries steeped in brandy, and drain brandied ones well or the custard will thin and weep.
- Order of assemblyThe cherries go into each mould before the custard is added, so they sit through the pudding rather than floating on top. Distribute the cut pieces around the mould rather than dropping them in one clump.
- Custard means a water bathCustard means gentle heat -- Any pudding set with a poured custard wants gentle, even heat, which in practice means the moulds standing in a pan of hot water reaching halfway up. Direct fierce heat curdles the custard and pulls it away from the sides.
- Judging donenessThe centre should still wobble slightly when the moulds come out; it firms as it cools. A knife-clean centre means the custard has already gone past the point where it is smooth.
- "Serve the same way"Again a pointer back to the base recipe, which will specify the sauce and whether the puddings are turned out or served in the mould.
Names like "Tyrolienne" belong to the French professional naming system that dominated hotel and restaurant cooking around 1900, in which a dish is given a base preparation and then a place-name or personal-name tag to mark one small change to it. Here the tag is attached to nothing more than the addition of four cherries per mould, which is exactly how such lists worked: a kitchen with a standing repertoire could generate a whole series of separately named sweets from one custard-set fig pudding, and cookbooks of the period reproduced those chains verbatim, one terse cross-referencing paragraph after another. Tyrol, the Alpine region straddling what is now western Austria and northern Italy, is fruit and cherry country, though in classical usage Tyrolienne normally denotes a tomato-and-fried-onion garnish rather than anything to do with cherries. Figs themselves would have come to a professional pantry dried and pressed, a year-round staple long before fresh ones were a realistic option in most cities.