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Pudding, Olga
Boil a pint milk with a clove in a saucepan, add two ounces butter and mix well until the butter is melted; remove the pan to the table, take up the clove, add three ounces sugar and three ounces flour. Mix again with a wooden spoon for five minutes, add three egg yolks one by one, mixing for a minute at one-minute intervals. Beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth and gradually add to the pan, gently mixing with skimmer meanwhile. Add six crushed macaroons, one ounce finely chopped cedrat and one tablespoon kirsch; lightly mix with the skimmer. Lightly butter and sugar a quart pudding mould and drop in the preparation. Lay the mould in a saucepan with hot water up to half the height of the mould. Set in the oven for forty minutes. Remove, unmould on a hot dish. Pour an apricot sauce over the pudding and serve.
A flour-and-butter panada enriched with yolks and lightened with whites, steamed in a water bath — closer to a soufflé pudding than to a baked custard. The original gives no oven temperature and assumes a cook who knows how to handle a bain-marie.
- The hinge: keep the water bath below a simmerThe pudding sets on egg, and water lapping at boiling point will curdle the outside before the centre firms. Use water that steams but does not bubble, and top it up with more hot water if it drops.
- Oven temperatureUnstated in the original. A moderate oven, in the region of 325-350F, suits a bain-marie pudding of this size; hotter and the mixture is liable to puff and then collapse when unmoulded.
- CedratThe French name for citron (Citrus medica), sold as candied citron peel. It is the pale, thick-cut peel in old fruitcake mixes — not lemon and not orange, though candied lemon peel is the nearest substitute.
- MacaroonsAlmond macaroons, the small crisp Italian-French kind (amaretti work well), not the coconut ones.
- Adding the flourThree ounces of flour going into hot milk off the heat will lump unless it is sifted in and beaten hard with the wooden spoon; the five minutes of mixing the recipe calls for is not padding.
- SkimmerA flat perforated spoon, used here the way a modern cook uses a rubber spatula — to fold the whites and the garnish in without knocking out air.
- The mouldA quart mould is about 1 litre. Butter it, then dust with sugar rather than flour so the pudding releases with a caramelised skin. Let it stand three or four minutes out of the water before turning out.
- Apricot sauceMost likely apricot jam warmed with a little water and passed through a sieve; the recipe itself gives no formula. Make it while the pudding bakes and keep it warm; it should pour, not coat.
- YieldServes four to six, and it must go straight to the table — a soufflé pudding of this kind sinks and firms as it cools.
The pudding belongs to the grand-hotel tradition of French cooking as it was practised in New York restaurant kitchens around 1900, where a base of milk, butter, sugar and flour — a panada, essentially the same mixture that begins a soufflé — was lightened with beaten whites, flavoured with a liqueur and a candied fruit, and given a woman's name. Filippini, long of Delmonico's, filled his books with dishes titled this way: names of patrons, singers, society figures and members of European royal houses, attached to preparations that differ from one another by little more than the liqueur and the garnish. Which Olga is meant is not recorded, and the several Russian and Greek royal Olgas of the period are all plausible candidates rather than documented ones. The genuinely period details are the cedrat, a candied citron peel then common in confectionery and now largely confined to Christmas baking, and the kirsch, which in this era is often said to have been the usual perfume for anything served with apricot.