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Pudding Italienne
Place in a bowl six chopped candied marrons, four crushed macaroons, two ounces stale cake or bread crumbs, three tablespoons lemon sugar, two eggs, yolks of two others, one and a half gills cream, two tablespoons rum, two ounces each chopped candied orange and Smyrna raisins, and sharply stir with a wooden spoon for five minutes. Lightly butter and flour a plain pudding mould, drop in preparation and cover it with a buttered paper, place mould in saucepan, pour hot water in pan up to half the height of mould and set in oven for forty-five minutes. Remove, take up mould from pan, let rest for five minutes, unmould on a dish, pour rum sauce over and serve.
A steamed-baked custard pudding in the French style, built on candied chestnuts and macaroons. Nothing here is difficult, but the original assumes you know several things it never says — chiefly the oven temperature and what goes into the rum sauce.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A bain-marie custard of this kind wants 325-350F; hotter and the eggs curdle at the mould's edge before the centre sets. Keep the water in the pan hot but never simmering.
- GillsIn American measure a gill is 4 fl oz, half a cup, so one and a half gills of cream is about 3/4 cup (180 ml). In British measure a gill is 5 fl oz, which would give rather more.
- Candied marronsMarrons glacés, candied chestnuts. Sold in jars or loose at Christmas; chestnut pieces in syrup work as well and are cheaper. Drain them before chopping or the batter loosens.
- Lemon sugarNot a product but a preparation: granulated sugar rubbed with lemon zest until damp and fragrant, then left to dry. Three tablespoons of plain sugar plus the grated zest of one lemon gives the same result.
- Smyrna raisinsSeedless golden raisins from the region around Izmir — what most shops now sell as sultanas. Ordinary golden raisins are a direct substitute.
- The mould and the paperA "plain" pudding mould is a smooth-sided charlotte or dariole mould with no fluting. The recipe gives no size, though the quantities suit something around a quart. Butter and flour it, fill no more than three-quarters, and cover with buttered parchment in place of the buttered paper the recipe calls for. Do not seal it tight; steam needs somewhere to go.
- DonenessForty-five minutes suits a mould of roughly a quart, but judge by the centre: it should be just set with a faint wobble, and a skewer should come out clean of liquid custard. Smaller moulds will be done sooner, in the region of 25-30 minutes.
- Resting and unmouldingThe five-minute rest is not optional. It lets the pudding contract slightly from the sides; turned out immediately, it slumps.
- The rum sauceNo recipe is given, as the book expects the cook to know one. A sabayon or a thin custard finished with rum would suit, as would sweetened cream heated with rum and thickened slightly. Serve at once, hot, over the turned-out pudding.
- YieldProbably four to six servings. It is rich, and the portions should be small.
Puddings "à l'italienne" in Anglo-French cookery of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rarely came from Italy; the name is often said to signal macaroons, candied fruit and marrons — the Piedmontese and Ligurian confectionery that had long since been absorbed into the French pastry repertoire. Candied chestnuts in particular were a luxury, expensive enough that a pudding built on six of them announced itself as a party dish. The construction is pure hotel kitchen: a moulded custard set in a water bath, turned out whole and sauced at the table. The bain-marie in the oven, rather than a pot of boiling water on the range, gives gentler heat, less risk of a curdled edge, and one less thing to watch.