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Bakewell Pudding
(Derbyshire.) Line a dish with puff paste, then a layer of gooseberry or peach jam, and some chopped candied peel. Fill with a custard made of the yolks of 6 eggs and 3 whites, 5 ounces of melted butter, 6 ounces of sugar, and a glass of lemon brandy, or any old-fashioned wine or cordial, with sufficient milk to make it smooth. Bake 3/4 hour, and serve cold, in the same dish. MARROW PUDDING. (A famous old dish at Cambridge.) Chop finely 3/4 pound of beef marrow and 6 ounces of bread-crumbs. Add 1/4 pound sugar, 1/4 pound currants, 2 beaten eggs, a spoonful of brandy, 2 spoonfuls of sherry, 1/4 pound of chopped and mixed candied peel and citron. Beat and pour into a mould, bake it 1 hour, and turn out, with custard sauce around it.
Two puddings share this page: a Bakewell with an unusually rich egg-and-butter filling, and a Cambridge marrow pudding. Neither gives an oven temperature, and both assume a cook who knows what a baked custard should look like.
- Oven temperatureBake the Bakewell at 350F, on a low shelf so the pastry base sets before the filling. The marrow pudding, baked in a mould for an hour, wants the same 350F, ideally in a water bath to keep the eggs from curdling.
- The hinge: do not overbakeThis filling is a custard thickened with butter, not a sponge. Pull it when the centre still trembles slightly; residual heat finishes it. Cooked until firm all through it weeps butter and turns grainy.
- "A glass" of brandy or wineIn late-Victorian usage a wine glass is about 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. Lemon brandy was brandy steeped with lemon peel; brandy plus a strip of zest, or a lemon liqueur, gives the same effect.
- "Sufficient milk to make it smooth"Deliberately vague and genuinely so. Start with a quarter cup of whole milk whisked into the eggs, sugar and cooled melted butter, and add more only until the mixture pours like heavy cream. Too much milk and it will not set over the jam.
- 6 yolks and 3 whitesThe extra yolks are for richness and colour; the three spare whites keep. Do not substitute whole eggs throughout or the filling sets rubbery rather than silky.
- Puff pasteShop-bought all-butter puff is a fair equivalent. Blind-bake the lined dish briefly before the jam goes in, or the jam's moisture will leave the base slack.
- Beef marrowAsk a butcher for marrow bones and scoop the raw marrow out, or have them split the bones. It should be chilled hard before chopping. Shredded beef suet is the usual stand-in, though it is firmer and less delicate.
- YieldThe Bakewell will roughly fill a 9-inch pie dish and serve six or so; the recipe says to serve it cold in its dish, which is how it slices cleanly. The marrow mixture makes about a quart of pudding, enough for a 1 1/2-quart mould with headroom.
Bakewell in Derbyshire gives its name to two related things: the pudding, an open pastry case with jam and a rich egg-and-butter filling, and the later almond-topped Bakewell tart familiar from British bakeries. The pudding is the older form, and its origin is traditionally told as an accident in a Bakewell inn kitchen, a story generally repeated rather than documented. Note that this version uses gooseberry or peach jam and candied peel, with no almond at all. The marrow pudding beside it belongs to an older English line still, boiled and baked suet-and-marrow puddings that carried a college's name as a mark of prestige.