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Impromptu Pudding
Two cupfuls mince meat, two cups flour, one and one half teaspoonfuls baking powder, five eggs. This pudding is a good one and is made with little trouble. Steam three hours, serve with wine sauce.
A steamed pudding stripped to four ingredients, leaning entirely on the jar of mincemeat for sugar, fat, spice and moisture. That makes the mincemeat the whole recipe, and worth choosing carefully.
- What "mince meat" means hereLate-19th-century mincemeat is a spiced preserve of chopped apple, raisins, currants, citrus peel, suet and spirits, often with a little chopped beef or beef tongue. Any modern jarred mincemeat works; two cupfuls is roughly 550-600g, or about a jar and a half of the usual 400g size. If yours is suet-free the pudding will be drier and slightly tougher.
- There is no added sugar, fat or liquidThat is deliberate, not an omission. Five eggs and the syrupy mincemeat are the only moisture, so the mixture should be a thick, dropping batter. If it is stiff enough to mound and hold its shape, slacken it with a few tablespoons of milk or brandy.
- Baking powder in 1900Baking powder of the period -- Period baking powders were single-acting, so they begin working as soon as they are wetted. Use a scant teaspoon and a half, and get the pudding into the steam promptly once it is mixed.
- Mould and preparationButter a 2-quart pudding basin or mould generously and fill it no more than two-thirds full, as this batter rises. Cover tightly with buttered parchment and foil, or a pleated cloth tied under the rim, so condensation cannot drip in.
- How to steam itStand the mould on a rack or folded cloth in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, and keep it at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates; letting the pot run dry is the usual way these puddings are ruined.
- Three hours is for one large mouldA single large pudding of this size does want the full three hours. Individual moulds or ramekins will be done much sooner, in the region of an hour to an hour and a quarter. It is cooked when a skewer comes out clean and the top springs back.
- Wine sauceOne common period version is simple: butter and sugar creamed together, thinned with sherry or Madeira and warmed over hot water until smooth, sometimes bound with an egg yolk. Do not let it boil or it will separate.
- YieldServes six to eight. Steamed puddings reheat well in the mould over simmering water for 30 minutes.
The word "impromptu" in the title suits a pudding that is less made than assembled: a jar of mincemeat already in the pantry converted into a pudding with flour and eggs as the only additions. Mincemeat in this period often did contain meat, and its ancestry lies in the older practice of preserving chopped meat with sugar, dried fruit, spice and spirits; the beef thinned out over the 19th and 20th centuries until commercial mincemeat commonly carried only suet, and eventually not even that. Steaming rather than baking was a usual treatment for a rich, close-textured pudding, partly for texture and partly because a pot on the stove-top demanded less watching than a wood-fired oven whose heat had to be judged by hand.