Home › The World's Kitchen › Pudding, Renaissance, Hot
Pudding, Renaissance, Hot
Cut into small dice pieces two ounces cake renaissance and place in a bowl with six candied maroons; also cut up one ounce candied cherries cut into quarters, two candied pears cut in small squares, two preserved apricots cut into squares and one teaspoon good maraschino. Mix them well together with the hand. Lightly butter and sugar six individual pudding moulds; fill them with the preparation up to three-quarters of their height. Sharply mix in a bowl four egg yolks, two ounces sugar and two gills cream; then divide this evenly into the six moulds. Place in a pastry tin, pour in hot water up to half their height and set in a moderate oven for twenty minutes. Remove, unmould on a dish, pour a Sabayon sauce over and serve.
This is a small baked custard built on candied fruit and cake crumb, finished with sabayon. It reads as hotel work: everything depends on the water bath and on stopping the custard before it curdles.
- Two gills of creamA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup. With four yolks and two ounces of sugar that gives a rich, barely-set custard — enough to bind the fruit, not enough to behave like a firm flan.
- Moderate ovenRead as roughly 325-350F. At that range individual moulds in a bain-marie will be set at the edge and just trembling at the centre in about twenty minutes; a thermometer in the middle should read around 170-175F.
- Candied maroonsMarrons glacés, whole candied chestnuts. Sold in jars or foil-wrapped at Christmas; six of them is roughly 100 g. Vacuum-packed unsweetened chestnuts are not a substitute here.
- Cake renaissancePresumably a cake given elsewhere in the book; in practice any close-grained sponge or g u00e9noise, two ounces of it, cut in small dice. Day-old cake dices better than fresh.
- MaraschinoThe dry Dalmatian cherry liqueur, not the pink syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. One teaspoon is all the recipe wants and it is enough to be tasted.
- Preparing the mouldsButter, then sugar, then chill the moulds before filling. The sugar coat is what lets these turn out cleanly; the fruit is sticky and will weld itself to a bare tin.
- Water bathHot water to half the height of the moulds, and add it after the tin is on the oven shelf rather than carrying it across the kitchen. A folded towel or paper in the bottom of the tin stops the bases from cooking too hard.
- UnmouldingLet them stand two or three minutes out of the water, run a thin knife round, then invert. Straight from the oven they slump; fully cold they stick.
- Sabayon and yieldSix individual puddings. The sauce is yolks, sugar and wine — white wine or a fortified wine such as Marsala — whisked over barely simmering water until thick and warm, and poured over just before serving since it deflates as it stands.
Puddings like this belong to the grand-hotel and restaurant repertoire of the turn of the twentieth century, when a kitchen kept jars of candied cherries, pears, apricots and marrons glac u00e9s on hand and dessert cooks were expected to combine them into named compositions. Individual moulds baked in a bain-marie and turned out under a foaming sabayon were a standard format: rich, small, and dressed at the last moment. The name looks decorative rather than descriptive — classical French cookery attached labels such as renaissance to garnishes, cakes and sauces, so it is probably best taken as a style name rather than any claim of Renaissance origin. The sabayon itself is the French form of Italian zabaglione.