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Pudding, Comtesse
Lightly butter a large pudding mould. Cut from a stale loaf of sandwich bread eight slices quarter-inch thick; round them to two and a half inches in diameter. Spread a teaspoon raspberry jelly over each slice. Finely chop up together one ounce candied lemon peel, one ounce well-picked currants and one peeled and cored apple. Place all these fruits in a bowl with a tablespoon rum; mix well together, spread the mixed fruits equally over the eight slices of bread and lay in the mould, one on top of another. Mix in a bowl three raw eggs, two ounces granulated sugar and three-quarters of a pint cold milk. Strain this preparation over the bread in the mould. Place the mould in a saucepan with hot water up to half the height of the mould. Set in the oven for forty-five minutes. Remove, unmould on a large dish. Pour a groseille-maraschino sauce over and serve.
A layered bread-and-custard pudding baked in a water bath and turned out whole. The whole thing stands or falls on the custard, so treat it as a custard first and a bread pudding second.
- The hinge: gentle heatThe recipe gives no oven temperature; use 325°F. Above about 350°F the egg custard curdles and weeps, and the pudding will slump rather than unmould cleanly. The water in the bain-marie should be hot but not boiling when it goes in, and should never come to a boil in the oven.
- DonenessForty-five minutes is a reasonable guide for a mould of about 1 quart, but judge by the custard: it is set when a knife near the centre comes out clean and the internal temperature reads 170–175°F. A wider, shallower mould cooks faster.
- Three-quarters of a pintFilippini worked in American measure, so this is about 1½ cups (12 fl oz) of milk. If you are reading from a British edition, an imperial three-quarter pint is 15 fl oz — either works, the larger amount simply gives a looser custard.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants. "Well-picked" means going through them for stems and grit, which modern packaged fruit rarely needs. One ounce is a scant ¼ cup.
- The breadStale close-crumbed white sandwich bread is right; a soft modern supermarket loaf turns to paste. Dry the rounds out uncovered for a few hours, or in a 200°F oven for 10 minutes, so they absorb the custard without collapsing.
- AssemblyThe recipe says only to butter the mould lightly; a dusting of sugar over the butter is a common modern aid to release. Stack the spread rounds flat, one over another. Letting the custard soak in before baking is not in the text, but it helps the bread saturate so the layers hold together when turned out.
- Groseille-maraschino sauceGroseille is redcurrant. Melt redcurrant jelly with a little water until pourable and stir in maraschino liqueur to taste — the true bitter-almond Luxardo type, not the syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries, which is a different product entirely.
- Unmoulding and yieldLet the pudding stand out of the water bath for 10 minutes before inverting; straight from the oven it is too fragile. Eight rounds of 2½-inch bread makes a modest pudding serving four, or six as part of a larger meal.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book (1906) reflects the French-service repertoire of that world, where a dish took a name to signal its garnish or dressing rather than its origin. "Comtesse" is one of a long series of aristocratic labels — Impératrice, Marquise, Duchesse — attached to sweet and savoury preparations in nineteenth-century French kitchens; the titles were decorative conventions of the menu card, and generally carry no documented connection to any particular countess. Underneath the name this is a close cousin of the English bread-and-butter pudding and the charlotte, both built on the same thrifty logic of stale bread revived with custard and dried fruit. What marks it as restaurant cooking rather than household cooking is the finish: the bread rounds cut to a uniform two and a half inches, the bain-marie, the turning out onto a dish, and a jelly-and-liqueur sauce poured over at the last moment.