Pudding à la Bohémienne

Pudding à la Bohémienne (a moulded custard ring holding fruit-filled pancakes) teaches one thing before all else: custard sets by gentle coagulation, and the bain-marie must never boil. Get that quiet heat right and the slice is smooth and ivory, with little parcels of crêpe and jewel-bright salpicon waiting inside; let the water gallop and the custard turns porous.

The original assumed a pastry station handing over tiny pancakes, a stiff apple purée, a vanilla custard rich in whole eggs, and a border mould large enough for banquet service. At home, a five-cup savarin mould and one small skillet do the same work for six. Making every component at once was brigade scaffolding and can go. The salpicon, the wrapped crêpes, the whole-egg custard, the quiet poach, and cooling in the mould are the dish, so they stay. One cook, one stove, one evening.

Serve the pudding cold, but coat it at the last moment with warm kirsch sabayon, a whisked wine-and-yolk foam that runs down the ivory ring in a golden curtain. The one step that decides tonight's pudding is the poach: watch the water, not the clock, and cool the bath at the first bubble.