Puddings and pastry à la mode

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Puddings and Pastry à la Mode (1889) is a specialized Victorian dessert manual by Harriet Anne de Salis, devoted entirely to sweet puddings, tarts, and pastry work. Organized alphabetically across its recipe sections, the book moves from Albert Pudding through to foundational pastry techniques, offering readers a dense catalog of roughly 150 anchored recipes. The collection reflects the aspirations of formal Victorian entertaining, with recipes calling for gelatine-set molds, elaborate garnishes of candied fruit and almonds, and luxury additions like brandy, sherry, and pistachios. Alongside grand molded puddings and iced creations, the book also includes simpler fare such as bread puddings and a scattering of savory dishes like Potato Pudding and Tomato Tart, showing the flexible use of the word pudding in this era. The final section shifts from individual recipes to instructional groundwork, detailing puff-paste, flaky crust, and short crust methods essential to Victorian pastry work, before closing with an index. For modern readers, this book offers a window into the technical vocabulary and presentation standards of upper-class Victorian dessert cookery, valuable both as a culinary reference and as a document of period taste and domestic aspiration.

The book is arranged in three mechanically gated sections spanning pages 0 to 28, following a broadly alphabetical recipe order as shown by the section headings, for example Dalhousie Pudding through Duchess Cakes in section 2 and Pineapple Souffle through Princess Pudding in section 3. Section 1 opens the collection with an array of molded puddings, fruit dishes, and tartlets. Section 2 continues the alphabetical run with more elaborate molded and iced desserts alongside cakes and pastries. Section 3 completes the alphabet of puddings, then pivots to a distinct instructional block covering foundational pastry doughs such as Puff-Paste, Feuilletage, Flaky Crust, Short Crust, and Light Crust, followed by notes on pastry dummies and a concluding index of recipes.