Home › The World's Kitchen › Pudding Espagnole
Pudding Espagnole
Lightly butter the interior of a quart pudding mould. Heat two ounces clarified butter in a saucepan, pour in one gill bread crumbs and let get a nice golden colour; then add half pint hot milk. Thoroughly mix with a wooden spoon till thoroughly thickened, remove the pan from the fire and mix well again for five minutes. Add two ounces powdered sugar, one teaspoon vanilla essence, two whole raw eggs and three yolks. Mix well. Now add the whites of the three eggs, beaten to a stiff froth. Gently mix again and then fill the mould with the preparation. Place the mould in a saucepan, pour hot water up to one-half the height of the mould, and bake in the hot oven for thirty minutes. Remove, unmould on a hot dish and serve with a Sabayon sauce.
A baked bread-crumb soufflé pudding, steamed in a water bath and turned out. The proportions are sound; only the units and the oven need translating.
- A gill of crumbsA gill is half a cup, so about 1/2 cup of fresh soft crumbs by loose measure — roughly 1 oz. Use fresh crumbs from a plain white loaf, not dry packaged crumbs, which will drink the milk and turn the pudding heavy.
- Clarified butterTwo ounces is 4 tablespoons of clarified butter, or about 5 tablespoons of whole butter melted and the milk solids skimmed off. Clarified is specified because it browns the crumbs to a nutty gold without the solids scorching.
- "Hot oven"Period tables put a hot oven at roughly 400–450F. Because the mould stands in water to half its height, the body of the pudding stays near boiling, so the higher setting mainly speeds the process; 375–400F is safer against curdling at the edges.
- The water bathThe mould goes into a saucepan or roasting pan and the water comes halfway up — pour it in boiling, and top up if it falls. The point is gentle, even heat; if the water is allowed to boil hard the pudding will puff and then collapse into a weeping mass.
- The five minutes of beatingBeating the thickened panade off the heat for a full five minutes cools it below the point where it will scramble the eggs, and works out lumps. Do not shortcut it, and do not add the eggs to a steaming-hot base.
- Folding the whites"Gently mix again" means fold, not stir. Work a spoonful of the beaten whites in first to loosen the heavy crumb base, then fold in the rest in two additions and stop while a few streaks remain.
- Doneness and unmouldingThirty minutes suits a quart mould; the centre should be just set and a skewer come out clean. Let it stand three or four minutes before turning out — straight from the oven it is too fragile.
- Sabayon sauceEgg yolks, sugar and a fortified wine such as Marsala or sherry, whisked over simmering water until thick and foamy. Best made at the last moment and served warm; it will slacken and separate if left to stand.
- YieldA quart mould serves four generously, or six as part of a longer meal.
Puddings of this type — a butter-and-crumb panade enriched with eggs and lightened with whipped whites — can be thought of as the everyday cousins of the soufflé, apparently cheaper than a flour-and-cream base and, it is often said, far more forgiving in a mould. The name is menu French rather than geography: dishes were routinely tagged à l'espagnole, à la portugaise, à la polonaise to distinguish variants on a standard preparation, and the label often signalled little more than the flavouring or the accompanying sauce. Such nominally national dishes were a habit of the era's international cookbooks, which gathered them from the repertoire of hotel and restaurant cooking, where the underlying grammar was uniformly French. The sabayon that finishes it is the French rendering of Italian zabaglione, generally traced to northern Italy and long used in both countries as a hot sauce for puddings as well as a dessert in its own right.