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Pudding, Portugal
Place two tablespoons ground rice in a saucepan with half pint milk and two ounces butter; stir until it comes to a boil, remove, and let cool off. Add two egg yolks, two ounces sugar, two tablespoons seeded Malaga raisins and one tablespoon Madeira wine; briskly mix for five minutes with a wooden spoon. Beat up the whites of four eggs to a stiff froth and gently mix with the preparation. Drop this into a well-buttered quart pudding mould, place it in a saucepan with hot water up to half the height of the mould, then bake in the oven for forty minutes. Remove, unmould upon a large dish. Peel a nice, sound, juicy orange, separate in sections, neatly trim them and arrange around the base of the pudding. Pour a raspberry sauce over the pudding and serve hot.
A steam-baked soufflé pudding built on a rice-flour panada, thickened and lightened in the same bowl. The points below cover the vessel, the oven and the two places the recipe assumes knowledge it does not supply.
- Ground riceThis is rice flour, not cooked rice or short-grain pudding rice. Fine white rice flour from any supermarket or Asian grocer behaves the same way; it thickens as it heats and needs stirring the whole time to stay smooth.
- Half pint of milkIf the book is American, a half pint is one cup (8 fl oz). An imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, and the base will be looser than intended.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as the book leaves it to the cook's judgement. A moderate oven, around 325-350F, suits it. Higher and the outside sets into a rubbery wall while the centre is still slack.
- The water bathHot water to half the mould's height, and keep it there. The saucepan needs to go in the oven, so use a deep roasting pan if your pan will not take the heat, and top up with boiling water if the level drops.
- Two yolks, four whitesNot a misprint. The extra whites are what lift a pudding this rich in butter, so you will have two spare yolks. Fold the meringue in three additions with a light hand; overworking it here is the difference between a risen pudding and a dense one.
- Malaga raisinsLarge sweet muscat raisins, seed-bearing, so the recipe specifies them seeded. Any muscat or large flame raisin works; halve them if they are very big, since whole ones sink through a light batter.
- UnmouldingRest the mould five minutes out of the water before turning it out. Straight from the oven the structure is still steam-supported and it will slump; left too long, the butter sets against the tin and it sticks.
- Raspberry sauceThe book assumes you know it: raspberries crushed with sugar and pushed through a sieve to remove the seeds, loosened with a little water or wine and warmed through, not boiled. Sieved raspberry jam thinned with lemon juice is the shortcut.
- YieldA quart mould serves four generously. It must go to table hot, since a soufflé pudding is at its best in the first ten minutes.
Puddings labelled by country fill the middle chapters of turn-of-the-century international cookbooks, and the label often seems to point at one or two ingredients rather than at any dish eaten in that country. Here it is the Madeira and the Malaga raisins: fortified wine from the Portuguese island and sweet muscat raisins from Andalusia, both staple imports in American and British pantries by 1900 and both shorthand for the Iberian peninsula on a menu card. The technique underneath is thoroughly French, a rice-flour panada enriched with yolks and lightened with whipped whites, baked au bain-marie in a mould and turned out whole. That style of hot moulded pudding, sauced and garnished with fruit at the base, is generally taken to have been a common sweet course of the hotel and restaurant kitchens these books drew on, and the orange sections arranged around the foot are as much a plating convention of the period as they are a flavour.