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Honey Pudding
Place four ounces honey in a bowl with four ounces stale cakes or bread crumbs, stir with a wooden spoon three minutes, then add two ounces rice flour, the grated rind of a lemon, half teaspoon ground ginger, one gill milk, one ounce butter, the yolks of three eggs, and sharply mix for five minutes. Beat up the whites of the three eggs to a stiff froth, gradually add to mixture, and gently mix with the skimmer for a minute. Pour the preparation into a lightly buttered pudding mould, set in oven and bake for fifteen minutes, remove, unmould on a dish, pour a Groseille-maraschino sauce over and serve.
A light crumb-and-egg pudding of the sort that sits between a bread pudding and a soufflé. The original gives no oven temperature and a suspiciously short bake, so both need judgment.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe whipped whites are what lift this; the instruction to "gently mix with the skimmer for a minute" means fold with a broad flat implement, not beat. A silicone spatula does the job. Overworking here gives a dense, damp pudding.
- Weights, not volumesFour ounces of honey is about 1/3 cup. Four ounces of crumbs is roughly a cup if they are fine and dry, closer to two cups if they are coarse or fresh. A kitchen scale removes the guesswork, and crumb volume varies wildly with how fine you grind.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. In British books of the period a gill sometimes means 5 fl oz, but this is an American book, so use 4.
- Rice flourStill sold, usually as white rice flour in the baking or Asian-foods aisle. It is not the same as glutinous or sweet rice flour, which will make the pudding gummy.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven — 350F — suits an egg-lightened crumb pudding. Hotter and the outside sets before the centre climbs.
- Fifteen minutes is shortThat timing would suit small individual moulds of four to six ounces. For the single pudding mould the recipe specifies, expect nearer 30 to 40 minutes at 350F, until the centre is just set and a skewer comes out clean.
- UnmouldingButter the mould well and let the pudding rest three or four minutes before turning out; straight from the oven it is too fragile.
- Groseille-maraschino sauceGroseille is redcurrant. Warm redcurrant jelly with a splash of maraschino liqueur until pourable. Warmed jelly with a little kirsch or lemon juice is a reasonable stand-in.
- YieldServes four, or six as a small course after a full dinner.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), assembled by a chef long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and it carries the marks of a professional kitchen working in the French manner: the French sauce name, the assumption that stale cake is always on hand, the skimmer reached for as a folding tool. Honey puddings are much older than the book — sweetening baked crumb dishes with honey predates cheap refined sugar in Europe by centuries. The recipe is also a thrift dish dressed up: its base is yesterday's cake, rescued with eggs and a liqueur sauce and sent out as though it had been planned.