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Fig Pudding
Take one pound of figs, six ounces of suet, three-quarters of a pound of flour, and milk. Chop the suet finely, mix it with the flour, and make in to a smooth paste with milk. Roll it out about half an inch thick, cut the figs in small pieces, and stew them over the paste. Roll it up, make the ends secure, tie the pudding in a cloth, and boil from one and a half to two hours.
This is a rolled suet pudding — a fig roly-poly — boiled in a cloth rather than steamed in a basin. The proportions work out to a stiff dough, and the fruit is layered in rather than mixed through.
- "Stew them over the paste"Almost certainly a misprint for strew. The chopped figs are scattered over the rolled-out dough, not cooked beforehand.
- Weights in cupsThree-quarters of a pound of flour is about 2 3/4 cups; six ounces of suet is roughly 1 1/4 cups when finely chopped or coarsely grated. One pound of dried figs is about 3 cups chopped.
- The unmeasured milkThe original gives no quantity, presumably leaving the cook to judge by feel. Expect somewhere in the region of 3/4 to 1 cup for a firm, rollable paste that is not sticky -- add it a little at a time.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, and it is what makes a pudding of this type light rather than greasy. Butchers will often supply it; shredded packet suet, beef or vegetarian, behaves the same way and needs no chopping.
- FigsDried figs, not fresh. Trim the hard stem ends before chopping; soaking is not needed.
- The pudding clothScald a square of unbleached calico or a tea towel, wring it out, and flour the inside surface generously before wrapping — the flour forms the skin that keeps water out. Wrap loosely enough for the pudding to swell, tie the ends like a cracker, and keep the water at a steady simmer, topping up with boiling water so it never drops below the pudding.
- Or steam itA pudding basin covered with pleated parchment and foil, steamed for two hours or a little longer, gives a close result with far less anxiety about a leaking cloth.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. It wants a hot sauce — custard, or the traditional brandy or lemon sauce — since the pudding itself is only sweetened by the fruit.
Rolled suet puddings boiled in a cloth were a mainstay of British and American winter cookery for generations, and the cloth largely replaced the animal-gut casings that earlier puddings required, letting a filling dish be cooked in the same pot as the meat. Figs entered this tradition as an imported dried fruit that kept well and needed no added sugar; "figgy pudding" of the sort the carol asks for was not always made with figs, and the link between the two is looser than it looks. Recipes like this one -- terse, unmeasured in its liquid, assuming the reader knows what a pudding cloth is -- read as the tail end of a long practice rather than the start of one.