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Victoria Pudding
Place in a saucepan one and a half pints milk, half pint cream and a vanilla bean or a teaspoon vanilla essence; let boil five minutes. Mix in a bowl four ounces sugar with six egg yolks and a tablespoon arrowroot, sharply mix with whisk, then pour in, little by little, the boiled milk, briskly mix while adding it. Strain this into a lightly buttered quart pudding mould, place it in a saucepan, pour in hot water up to half its height, then set in oven forty-five minutes. Remove, let stand for ten minutes. Mix in a saucepan three tablespoons currants with a tablespoon maraschino, set on fire until melted, unmould pudding on a large dish, pour sauce over and serve.
A baked custard in the French crème renversée manner, dressed up with a red-currant and maraschino sauce. Nothing here is difficult, but the original omits the oven temperature and is optimistic about the size of the mould.
- The hinge: gentle heatA custard of six yolks to four cups of dairy sets soft, and it will curdle and weep if the water bath simmers. Bake at 325F and keep the water hot but never bubbling; the pudding is done when the edge is set and the centre still trembles, around 170-175F on a thermometer.
- Mould sizeA pint and a half of milk plus half a pint of cream is already four cups before the sugar and yolks go in. A true quart mould will overflow; use a 1.5-quart mould, or fill the quart mould short and bake the rest in a ramekin alongside.
- Imperial or US pintsFilippini was writing in New York, so read these as US pints (16 fl oz). If you work from an Imperial pint, you will have a quarter more liquid again and will certainly need the larger mould.
- "Set on fire"This means set on the fire, i.e. over heat, not flambeed. The currant sauce is simply warmed until it loosens.
- Three tablespoons currantsGenuinely ambiguous. "Melted" points strongly to red currant jelly, a common base for such sauces; dried currants do not melt. If you use jelly, three tablespoons warmed with a tablespoon of maraschino gives a thin glaze for the whole pudding.
- MaraschinoThe clear, dry cherry-stone liqueur (Luxardo and the like), not the syrup from a jar of bright red cocktail cherries, which is a twentieth-century product and much sweeter.
- ArrowrootStill sold, and worth using rather than cornstarch here: it sets clear and keeps the custard's clean flavour. Whisk it into the sugar and yolks dry so it does not lump when the hot milk goes in.
- Boiling the milk five minutesWith a vanilla bean this is infusion, and the reduction is part of the recipe. With extract, bring it just to a boil and add the vanilla off the heat, since alcohol-based extract loses much of its aroma in five minutes of boiling.
- Unmoulding and yieldThe ten-minute rest is short for a custard this size; twenty to thirty minutes gives a firmer turn-out. Run a thin knife round the rim first. Serves six.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York before compiling The International Cook Book, and his repertoire is essentially the French restaurant canon of the late nineteenth century, filed by name rather than by nation. "Victoria" was one of the standard honorifics attached to dishes during and just after Queen Victoria's long reign, alongside Albert, Alexandra and Prince of Wales; it signalled richness and a certain propriety more than any fixed formula, and cooks applied it to soups, sauces and puddings that had little in common. What sits underneath the name here is the plain baked cream custard the French call crème renversée, thickened slightly with arrowroot so it will stand up when turned out of the mould. The maraschino, distilled in Dalmatia from marasca cherries and their stones, was a fashionable finishing liqueur in grand hotel kitchens of the period, and red currant jelly was the standard bright, tart foil for anything pale and sweet.