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Hanover Pudding
Place in a bowl two ounces good butter, beat it with a wooden spoon for five minutes, then add, little by little, two egg yolks and a whole egg and briskly stir with a wooden spoon for five minutes; add two tablespoons flour, three tablespoons granulated sugar, three tablespoons finely chopped, candied lemon peels, one tablespoon orange essence, one salt-spoon salt, one ounce picked currants, two ounces bread crumbs and one gill cold milk. Mix well with a skimmer for a minute. Lightly butter and flour six individual pudding moulds; fill them with the preparation, place the moulds in a tin and pour boiling water up to half their height. Set the pan in the oven for thirty minutes. Remove, unmould and serve a claret wine Sabayon separately.
A small baked custard-crumb pudding, closer to an English steamed pudding than to a cake, cooked in a water bath and served with a wine sabayon. The measurements are pre-standard and a few need translating before you start.
- The hinge: bake it as a bain-marieThe boiling water poured halfway up the moulds is what keeps the egg mixture tender rather than curdled and dry. Use a deep tin, pour the water after the tin is on the oven shelf, and check that the water has not boiled away before the thirty minutes are up.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. A water-bath pudding of this kind wants a moderate oven, 350F, and the puddings are done when the centres are just set and a skewer comes out clean.
- A gill4 fluid ounces (half a cup) in American measure; a British gill is 5 fluid ounces, so err toward the smaller if the batter looks slack. Two ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons; two ounces of breadcrumbs is roughly a cup of fresh soft crumbs, rather less if they are dry.
- A salt-spoonA quarter teaspoon, the smallest spoon in a Victorian condiment set.
- Orange essenceA tablespoon of modern alcohol-based orange extract will overwhelm six small puddings. A teaspoon of extract, or the grated zest of an orange, is the safer starting point.
- Picked currantsDried Zante currants, "picked" meaning gone over by hand for stems and grit. Modern packaged currants need only a rinse and a pat dry.
- Moulds and yieldSix individual moulds means six dariole moulds or ramekins of about 4 to 6 fluid ounces each. Butter and flour them thoroughly and let the puddings stand a few minutes before turning out, or they will tear.
- The skimmerA flat perforated spoon; the recipe asks only that the mixture be mixed well with it for a minute. A rubber spatula does the same work.
- The sauceClaret sabayon is red Bordeaux, egg yolks and sugar whisked over barely simmering water until thick and foamy. It must be made at the last minute and served warm; it separates on standing.
The Hanoverian succession put George I on the British throne in 1714, and 'Hanover' turns up as a dish name in nineteenth-century cookery writing, though no single fixed recipe stands behind it and the reason for the attachment is not documented. What is here reads as a French-trained kitchen's version of an English boiled pudding: breadcrumbs, currants and candied peel, the standard furniture of a plum or cabinet pudding, but bound with creamed butter and eggs, baked in individual moulds in a water bath, and finished with a sabayon rather than a hard sauce. That combination of an English nursery dessert with restaurant plating and a wine sauce is characteristic of the grand-hotel cooking these turn-of-the-century international compilations drew on.