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Ginger Pudding
Place in a basin one ounce butter, two raw eggs and one-saltspoon salt. Sharply mix with a wooden spoon for five minutes. Add one and three-quarter ounces granulated sugar, one level tablespoon grated, preserved ginger, one ounce remnants of cakes or bread crumbs, two gills cold milk and one teaspoon vanilla essence. Mix all well together with a wooden spoon for five minutes. Then fill up six lightly buttered individual pudding moulds. Place the moulds in a small roasting tin, pour in boiling water up to half the height of the moulds, place in a hot oven for thirty minutes. Remove, unmould on a hot dish. Pour a Sabayon sauce over them and serve.
A small baked custard pudding, not a steamed one, despite the moulds. The weights are professional-kitchen small, so a scale helps more than cups here.
- The measuresOne ounce butter is 2 tablespoons; one and three-quarter ounces sugar is a scant 1/4 cup; two gills of milk is one cup if the gill is reckoned at 4 fl oz, but 10 fl oz if the British 5-fl-oz gill is meant. A saltspoon is usually reckoned at about 1/4 teaspoon.
- "Hot oven" needs temperingThe recipe gives no temperature, and "hot oven" in period usage is generally taken to mean somewhere in the 400-450F range, hot enough to risk curdling an egg-and-milk custard even in a water bath. Bake at 325-350F and expect roughly the stated 30 minutes for small moulds; the centres should be just set with a slight wobble.
- The water bath is the pointPour the boiling water to halfway up the moulds and keep it there. If it boils hard, add a little cold water; a simmering bath gives a smooth set, a rolling one gives bubbles and weeping.
- Preserved gingerThis is stem ginger in heavy syrup, sold in jars, not crystallised ginger and not fresh root. Drain and blot it before grating or chopping fine, or the extra syrup loosens the mix.
- "Remnants of cakes"One ounce is about 1/2 cup of soft crumbs. Stale sponge or plain cake crumbs give a lighter pudding than dry bread crumbs; either way let the mixture stand ten minutes so the crumbs swell before filling the moulds.
- The ten minutes of mixingTwo five-minute beatings by hand would be one way to work butter and egg (and, at the second stage, sugar -- the recipe adds it only then) into a smooth emulsion without a mixer. A minute or two with a whisk or paddle does the same work; the goal is a smooth mixture, not an aerated one.
- UnmouldingLet the moulds sit out of the water for two or three minutes before turning out, and run a thin knife round the rim. Straight from the bath they are fragile.
- Sabayon sauceEgg yolks, sugar and a fortified or sweet wine whisked over barely simmering water until thick and pourable. Make it while the puddings bake and serve at once, since it separates as it stands.
- YieldSix small moulds. The mixture comes to roughly a pint in all, so these are small moulds of two to three fluid ounces, not large ramekins.
Ginger puddings belong to the British tradition of small moulded puddings, but this version is a French pastry-kitchen treatment of it: the mixture is baked au bain-marie in individual moulds rather than boiled in a cloth, and it is finished with sabayon, the French spelling of Italian zabaglione. The preserved ginger the recipe calls for is a further borrowing again: an English pudding, a Chinese preserve and an Italian sauce folded into one dish.