A Cheese Pudding

One of my favourite things to eat is cheesecake, and when looking through some recipe books in the archive for something fun to bake I came across several for cheese cakes and also this one for cheese pudding:

From the list of ingredients, I could see it wasn’t an early version of the kind of cheesecake I am so fond of, but anything with cheese in sounds good to me and, unlike many of the recipes the ingredients were minimal and easy to come by, so I gave it a go over the weekend.

The original recipe

Half a pound of mild Cheshire cheese a piece of butter the size of a walnut pounded well together in a Mortar, add two thirds of a gill of Cream, and two eggs, mix them well together half an hour will bake it.

My interpretation

• 200g Cheshire cheese
• a knob of butter (although I did happen to have an uncracked walnut to hand to double check too)
• 3 fl. oz. double cream (a gill being 5 fl. oz.)
• 2 eggs (I only had large ones in the house so that is what I used)

Even if my mortar was not currently in storage as I am between homes, it wouldn’t have been big enough to deal with 200g of cheese and of course Cheshire is a very crumbly cheese so I just used a fork and wooden spoon.

I then mixed in the butter with the fork, stirred in the cream and the two eggs.

The first baking dish I poured the mixture into was too small and would have left no room for rising, but unfortunately, the dish I did use was too big and even though there was very little rise to the dish (despite it essentially being a soufflé) it came out very flat.

I baked it at 200°C for the first 15 minutes, and then 10 minutes at 175°C. It would probably have been better at 180°C for the full baking time, perhaps 20-25 minutes, particularly as I was using a fan oven (but not my own!)

• 

  Crumbly cheese

• 

  Creamy mixture

• 

  Flat but golden pudding

It is nothing very exciting to look at, but it is very easy to make, and if you’re a fan of cheese, I can definitely recommend it – though I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re on dieting not least because it is rather rich and certainly moreish. Obviously I tasted it hot when it came out the oven, but I have also had it cold with my salad for lunch.

There are over 100 recipe books and loose recipes, in the archives and local studies collections, most of them summarised in our online catalogue. Some of the descriptions include a list of the recipes within each book. To order a copy of a particular recipe, complete our online order form letting us know the reference number and recipe/s you are interested in.

Of course, if you do make any we’d love to see your pictures, tweet them to us @FranklinArchive. Next time, I shall certainly make the “cheese cakes” – the lack of sugar puts me off a little, but we’ll see…