Home › Cakes, Puddings, and Pastry › Pompadour Pudding
Pompadour Pudding
(A French recipe.) Add 2 ounces fine white bread-crumbs to 1/3 pint of boiling cream, when cool, beat with 5 ounces finely chopped suet, 1 ounce of flour, 2 ounces crushed macaroons, 2 ounces stoned raisins, 2 ounces candied peel or preserved cherries chopped, zest of a lemon, and a pinch of nutmeg. Beat well, add yolks 4 eggs, and a glass of brandy, pour into mould and steam it. Serve with a custard sauce, hot, flavored with oranges or sherry.
A steamed suet pudding of the richer French sort, closer to a bread-and-almond pudding than to a Christmas plum pudding. The original gives no steaming time and no oven, so the two things to settle before starting are the size of the mould and how long it sits over the water.
- 1/3 pint of creamIf an imperial pint (20 fl oz) is meant, this is about 6 2/3 fl oz, a generous 3/4 US cup; on a US pint of 16 fl oz it would be nearer 5 1/3 fl oz. Single or light cream is right; the crumbs should swell into a thick paste, not a pourable one.
- "A glass of brandy"Genuinely elastic in Victorian usage. A wine glass of the period was commonly 2 to 2 1/2 fl oz, and that quantity suits this batter; more will loosen it and slow the set.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard kidney fat, sold shredded in tubs or grated frozen from a butcher's block. Five ounces to two ounces of crumbs is a very rich ratio and it is what gives the pudding its texture. Frozen grated butter will work but produces a denser, greasier crumb.
- MacaroonsThese are almond macaroons; dry Italian-style amaretti are the closest thing on a modern shelf. Coconut macaroons are a later variant of the same form and will not give the almond flavour the recipe wants.
- SweetnessNo sugar is called for. The macaroons, raisins and candied peel carry the whole load, so the pudding is only mildly sweet and leans on the custard sauce. An ounce or two of caster sugar beaten in with the yolks is defensible if you want it closer to modern expectations.
- Steaming, which the recipe omitsButter a 1-quart mould or basin, fill it no more than three-quarters, cover with pleated parchment and foil tied down, and set it on a trivet in a covered pan with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides. Allow 2 hours, topping up with boiling water, and test with a skewer. Four yolks and no whites means it sets by coagulation rather than rising, so it will not dome.
- Custard sauceA crème anglaise: 1 cup milk or cream, 3 yolks, 2 tbsp sugar, stirred over low heat to about 175F until it coats a spoon. The orange flavouring is best taken from zest steeped in the hot milk; the sherry goes in off the heat.
- YieldSix servings, and small ones — this is dense enough that a large slice defeats most people.
Dishes named for the Marquise de Pompadour, Louis XV's mistress, proliferated in nineteenth-century cookery long after her death: there are Pompadour cakes, creams, sauces and soups, most with no traceable connection to her table beyond the borrowed glamour of the name. The parenthetical "(A French recipe.)" is doing the same work the name does, promising continental polish. The pudding underneath is less French than advertised -- a suet-and-breadcrumb mixture steamed in a mould is thoroughly English in method -- but the almond macaroons, the lemon zest, the brandy and the custard sauce dress it in the manner of a Parisian entremets. Suet puddings of this kind were common household work in an age when beef fat was a by-product of every joint and steaming freed the oven for other things.