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Maraschino Pudding
Cut into half-inch-square pieces four ounces bread or remnants of cakes and place in a bowl with three ounces picked, dried raisins, one ounce seeded Malaga raisins and six canned cherries cut into quarters. Season with two tablespoons maraschino, then mix well for two minutes. Lightly butter and dredge with powdered sugar six individual pudding moulds; fill them with the mixture up to three-quarters of the height.
Crack two fresh eggs in a bowl, add two gills cold milk and two ounces fine sugar. Sharply beat for five minutes and then divide the preparation equally over the six uncooked puddings. Place the moulds in a pastry tin, pour in lukewarm water up to half the height of the moulds and set in the oven to bake for twenty minutes. Remove, unmould on a large dish and serve with a Sabayon sauce, prepared, with a tablespoon maraschino mixed in.
A bread-and-cake pudding baked as six individual custards in a water bath. The hinge is the water bath itself: the custard must set gently, so the water should stay below a simmer for the whole bake.
- Two gills of milkA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup. With two eggs and two ounces of sugar that gives a soft, loose custard — correct for this pudding, which relies on the bread to give it body.
- Oven temperatureUnstated in the original. Bake at 325-350F; hotter than that and the custard curdles at the edges of the moulds before the centres set.
- Bake timeTwenty minutes suits small, shallow moulds. Deeper ramekins will want 30-40 minutes. They are done when the centre is just set and barely trembles; residual heat finishes them.
- Maraschino means the liqueurA clear liqueur distilled from marasca cherries, stones included (Luxardo is the standard), not the sweet red syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. The two tablespoons here are there for perfume and to soften the bread, so a substitute of cherry brandy or kirsch changes the dish noticeably.
- Malaga raisinsLarge muscat raisins from southern Spain, sold on the stem and needing to be seeded by hand, which is why the recipe specifies 'seeded'. Any large muscat raisin works; if you use ordinary seedless raisins for both quantities, nothing is lost but a little chew.
- Dredging the mouldsButter, then powdered sugar rather than flour. The sugar caramelises slightly against the tin and helps the puddings release cleanly. Chill the buttered moulds for a few minutes before sugaring so the coating stays put.
- The water bathLukewarm water halfway up the moulds, as directed. Do not let it come to a boil during baking — the puddings will bubble and go porous. A folded towel in the base of the tin steadies the temperature.
- Sabayon sauceEgg yolks, sugar and wine whisked over hot water until thick and foamy, with a tablespoon of maraschino stirred in at the end. Whisk constantly and take it off the heat while it is still pourable; it collapses if held.
- YieldSix small individual puddings, one per person as written.
Maraschino began as a Dalmatian speciality, distilled around Zadar from the marasca sour cherry with a proportion of crushed stones and leaves, which is what gives it its faintly almond-bitter edge; by the nineteenth century it was a fashionable flavouring in the kitchens of Vienna, Paris and London, and the 'maraschino cherry' of later cocktail fame took its name from having originally been steeped in the real liqueur. The pudding is a thrifty dish in expensive clothing: its base is stale bread or, as the recipe says outright, 'remnants of cakes', bound with a small custard and given standing by liqueur, dried fruit and a sabayon. That combination — cake scraps upstairs, hotel-style individual moulds, a French sauce and an Adriatic spirit — is characteristic of the international grand-hotel cooking that books of this kind were written to codify for households aspiring to it.