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Pineapple Pudding
Four ounces fresh or preserved pineapples cut into small dice pieces, one gill hot milk, a teaspoon vanilla essence, one and half ounces butter, two eggs, two ounces sugar and two ounces sifted flour. Melt the butter in a small saucepan, gradually stir in the flour, then heat for one minute, continually stirring; pour in the hot milk and thoroughly heat on the fire for three minutes. Take from the stove, add the pineapples and sugar, stir for one minute. Add, one by one, the yolks of the two eggs, briskly stir for half a minute with the wooden spoon. Beat the white of the two eggs to a froth, add to the preparation, mixing gently.
Lightly butter a quart pudding mould, pour the preparation into the mould, cover with a lightly buttered paper, place it in a saucepan, pour hot water up to quarter the height of the mould. Set in the oven to steam for thirty-five minutes. Remove, take up the paper. Unmould the pudding on a hot dish. Decorate with six thin slices of pineapple around the dish and serve with the following sauce preparation:
Put two ounces sugar in a very small saucepan with two gills cold water, small piece of cinnamon, piece of a quarter of nutmeg and the rind of quarter of a lemon. Let gently boil for ten minutes. Remove from the fire, pour in a tablespoon rum, lightly mix, then strain through a cheesecloth into a saucebowl and serve.
This is a small steamed soufflé pudding built on a butter-and-flour panade, closer to a French pouding soufflé than to a heavy English boiled pudding. The measurements are by weight, and the whole thing serves four at most.
- The gillA gill is 4 fl oz, half a cup, in American measure (in British books it is 5 fl oz), so the pudding takes about 1/2 cup hot milk and the sauce about 1 cup cold water. The batter looks alarmingly thick at the panade stage; that is correct.
- Weights in cupsTwo ounces flour is a scant 1/2 cup, two ounces sugar is 1/4 cup, and one and a half ounces butter is 3 tablespoons. Four ounces pineapple is about 3/4 cup diced.
- Oven and water bath"Set in the oven to steam" means a bain-marie; the recipe gives no temperature, and a moderate oven, somewhere around 325-350F, suits it. The water should be hot when it goes in, as the recipe directs, and should never come to a rolling boil, or the edges set before the centre rises.
- The hinge: folding the whitesEverything else here is forgiving; the whites are not. Beat them to soft peaks only, loosen the panade with a spoonful first, then fold in the rest gently. Stirred in, they liquefy and the pudding steams into a dense cake.
- Fresh pineappleRaw pineapple contains bromelain, which will not harm this batter because the fruit is cooked, but very juicy fresh fruit thins the mixture. Drain diced fresh or canned pineapple well before adding it.
- UnmouldingA quart mould is roughly a 1-litre charlotte or pudding basin. Let the pudding stand two or three minutes out of the water before turning it out, and serve at once: like any soufflé pudding it starts to sink within minutes.
- The sauceTen minutes of gentle boiling reduces the cup of water to a thin spiced syrup, not a thick one. The rum goes in off the heat so it is not driven off, and straining through cheesecloth catches the cinnamon, nutmeg and lemon rind.
- YieldFour modest servings, or two generous ones. The six pineapple slices are garnish for the platter, not part of the batter.
The pudding belongs to the professional French repertoire that shaped American hotel cooking around 1900: a roux slackened with milk, enriched with yolks, lightened with beaten whites and steamed in a mould — an almond pouding soufflé on a restaurant menu, with fruit swapped in. Pineapple reached ordinary households through canning and the Hawaiian and Caribbean plantation trade, which may be why the recipe can offer "fresh or preserved" as equal options. The spiced rum syrup — cinnamon, nutmeg, lemon rind, a spoonful of spirit added off the fire — is an older sauce idea entirely, the sort of sweetened, aromatised water that had been served with puddings since the eighteenth century.