Home › Pastry and Puddings › Boiled Grape Pudding
Boiled Grape Pudding
Pare rich, tart apples, and cut to the size of a chestnut by cutting each quarter in four pieces, and add an equal measure of grapes, say one pint of each, and stir into it two spoonfuls of wheat meal. Then make a scalded wheat-meal crust, roll to one-third of an inch thick, place in it the prepared fruit, close it over the fruit, sew up in a napkin, put into boiling water and boil an hour. Grape dumplings may be made with the same materials; wrapping up half a teacupful of the fruit in a crust, and, for convenience, placing it in a patty-pan, and setting in the steamer. Cook until the apples are rather soft. Serve warm with sauce.
A boiled suet-less pudding of the old school: fruit sealed in a hot-water crust, tied in a cloth, and simmered. The crust is a wrapper as much as a pastry, and the whole thing lives or dies on how tightly it is sealed.
- Seal the cloth properlyThe napkin must be scalded, wrung out, and dusted generously with flour before the pudding goes in, or the crust will stick and tear when unwrapped. Sew or tie it snugly but leave a little slack for swelling; a leaking pudding takes on water and turns to paste.
- Wheat mealThis is whole wheat flour, coarser than modern all-purpose. Standard whole wheat flour works, though a stone-ground one is closer to what was meant. The two spoonfuls stirred into the fruit appear to act as a thickener for the juices; the size of spoon is not specified, but two tablespoons is a reasonable reading.
- Scalded crustA paste made by working boiling water into the flour, kneaded warm and rolled while still pliable; the recipe names no fat. It is sturdy rather than flaky, which is what a boiled pudding needs. Rolled to a third of an inch it should hold an hour of boiling.
- The grapesRecipes of this period generally assume slip-skin American grapes — Concord and its relatives — which are seedy and sharply acidic. Seedless table grapes give a much sweeter, blander result; if you use them, cut the sugar in the sauce. Concords can be pinched from their skins and the pulp sieved for pips, though the recipe does not call for it.
- ApplesTart cooking apples cut to chestnut size means roughly three-quarter-inch chunks — larger than you might expect, so they hold shape rather than collapsing. Bramley, Granny Smith or a firm russet all suit.
- The boilKeep the water at a steady rolling boil and topped up with more boiling water; dropping to a simmer or adding cold water gives a heavy, sodden crust. The pudding should be fully submerged the whole hour.
- The dumplingsIndividual dumplings steamed in patty-pans (small tart tins) will take considerably less time than the boiled pudding; the recipe gives a test rather than a time — cook until the apples are rather soft, yielding but not collapsed.
- Sauce and yieldNo sugar goes into the fruit here, so the sauce carries the sweetness — a hard sauce, a thin custard, or a lemon-and-sugar pudding sauce all fit the period. A pint each of apples and grapes makes a pudding for four to six.
Boiling a pudding in a floured cloth was the standard method in English and American kitchens for well over two centuries before ovens became reliable and common, and the technique survived in print long after it had stopped being a necessity. One suggestion of a date for this particular recipe is the fruit: grapes cooked as a pie or pudding filling are often associated with the American grape boom of the later nineteenth century, when Concord and similar slip-skin varieties were widely grown in home gardens and were said to be abundant each September. The insistence on wheat meal rather than white flour may also place it in a specific reform current ooks,, particularwith a health or temperance leaning are generally thought to have favored whole-grain crusts and unsugared fruit as a matter of principle, leaving the sweetening to a sauce served alongside.