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Scotch Pudding
Soak in a cup of cold milk two ounces bread crumbs for five minutes. Take up the bread with the band, press out the milk and place in a saucepan with one ounce raw beef marrow, chopped up, mix all well together with a wooden spoon for one minute, then add one ounce granulated sugar, one ounce picked currants, one tablespoon rum, half teaspoon vanilla essence and three egg yolks. Sharply stir with a wooden spoon for five minutes. Beat up the white of the three eggs to a stiff froth and add to other preparation, gently mixing. Then fill up six lightly buttered individual moulds, place them into a pastry tin with boiling water up to half their height. Place in the oven to bake for thirty-five minutes. Remove, unmould on a hot dish. Pour a Sabayon sauce over the pudding and serve.
A small baked custard-and-crumb pudding, closer to a French pouding de moelle than to anything Scottish. It is a delicate thing: the beaten whites are the only lift it has, so treat them accordingly.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirThe yolk mixture is beaten hard for five minutes to build body, but once the whites go in the mixing must be gentle and brief. Overworked whites give a dense, wet pudding that will not rise clear of the mould.
- "Take up the bread with the band"A typesetter's slip for "hand." Lift the soaked crumbs out and squeeze them, so the pudding is built on damp bread rather than milk.
- Weights, not cupsTwo ounces of fresh breadcrumbs is roughly a cup, loosely packed; one ounce of sugar is about two tablespoons; one ounce of currants about three tablespoons. Use a scale if you have one, as crumb volume varies wildly with the loaf.
- Beef marrowAsk a butcher for split marrow bones, or buy canoe-cut bones, and scoop the soft marrow out cold so it chops cleanly. It stands in for butter here and gives a silkier, less greasy set. Refrigerate it and use within a day or two; if marrow is unavailable, softened butter is the usual substitute, though the texture is firmer.
- "Picked" currantsDried Zante currants with the stems and grit picked out; dried fruit of the period generally needed more cleaning than what is sold now. A rinse, and a brief soak in the rum if you like, keeps them from scorching against the mould.
- Vanilla essenceRead this as vanilla extract, half a teaspoon. Period "essence" varied a good deal in strength, so treat the half teaspoon as a starting point.
- Oven and water bathThe recipe gives no temperature; a moderate oven, roughly 325 to 350F, is a reasonable modern reading. Use boiling water in the tin as directed so the custard starts setting immediately, and start checking before the thirty-five minutes are up -- the puddings should be just firm at the centre and beginning to pull from the mould.
- Moulds and unmouldingSix four-ounce ramekins or dariole moulds, buttered and, if you like, dusted with fine crumbs. Let them stand two or three minutes out of the water before turning out, or they will slump.
- The sauceSabayon here is the classic whisked foam of egg yolks, sugar and wine or rum beaten over barely simmering water until thick and warm. Make it while the puddings bake; it will not wait, and it must be poured warm. Serves six.
The name is a puzzle worth noticing: nothing in this pudding is Scottish. Marrow, currants, rum and a sabayon poured over unmoulded individual custards is the vocabulary of the French professional kitchen, and the recipe reads as though it was written by a chef trained in it — the wooden spoon, the timed beating, the pastry tin of boiling water. Hotel and restaurant cooks of the period attached national labels loosely, and "Scotch" on such menus often signalled little more than a British-sounding ingredient. Marrow may be the link here: marrow puddings were a long-standing feature of British cookery, and by 1900 they survived largely in grand cosmopolitan cooking of the kind The International Cook Book collects. The dish sits in the book as a specimen of how thoroughly the great hotel kitchens absorbed regional dishes and re-dressed them in French technique.