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Fig Pudding
Half pound figs, quarter pound grated bread, two and a half ounces powdered sugar, three ounces butter, two eggs, one tea-cup milk; chop figs fine and mix with butter, and by degrees add the other ingredients; butter and sprinkle a mold with bread-crumbs, pour in pudding, cover closely, and boil for three hours; serve with lemon sauce. Florence Woods Hush.
A plain boiled suet-less pudding of the English school, scaled small and steamed in a covered mold. The proportions are workable as written; the main adjustments are vessel, heat and time.
- Weights in cupsHalf a pound of dried figs is roughly 1 1/2 cups chopped; quarter pound grated bread is about 2 cups of fresh soft crumbs; 2 1/2 oz sugar is about 1/3 cup and 3 oz butter is 6 tablespoons. A tea-cup is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup, though the measure was never standard.
- "Grated bread"This is stale but not dry bread rubbed on a grater into soft crumbs, not the sandy dried crumbs sold in canisters. Packaged dry crumbs absorb far more liquid and will give a dense, pasty pudding.
- Boil means steamBoiling the mold -- The mold is covered closely and set in a pot of water; period practice was often to immerse it, but a gentler modern route is water partway up the sides kept at a bare simmer. Water at a hard boil will slop over the lid and rock the mold; top up with boiling water as it evaporates so the pan never runs dry.
- Three hours is realA steamed pudding of this size genuinely wants 2 1/2 to 3 hours. It is done when a skewer to the centre comes out clean and the pudding has pulled slightly from the mold; it cannot overcook in the way a baked cake can, only dry out if the pan boils away.
- Softening the figsModern dried figs are often harder than the ones intended here. Stem them and chop fine; if they are leathery, a brief soak in the warmed milk before mixing makes for an evener crumb.
- Creaming order"Mix with butter, and by degrees add the other ingredients" works best if the butter is soft and creamed with the sugar first, then the eggs, then crumbs and milk alternately, with the figs folded in last so they do not sink.
- The moldA 1 1/2-quart pudding basin or heatproof bowl gives the batter room, buttered and dusted with crumbs as directed. Cover with buttered foil or parchment pleated across the top and tie it down, so condensation cannot drip in.
- Lemon sauce and yieldThe recipe does not specify the sauce; period lemon sauces were generally boiled sauces of sugar and water or milk thickened with flour or cornstarch and finished with butter and lemon juice and zest. The quantities should serve about six, turned out hot and cut in wedges.
Boiled and steamed puddings dominate the pudding chapters of nineteenth-century American cookbooks because they suited a kitchen with a single stove and an unreliable oven: a covered mold in a pot of water needed only a steady fire and no judgement about heat. Figs came into the American pantry as an imported dried fruit, sold in pressed layers or strings alongside raisins and currants, and a fig pudding was the slightly more expensive cousin of the everyday bread-and-raisin puddings. Buckeye Cookery, generally traced to an Ohio compilation of 1876 and made up of contributions by named housekeepers, prints this one under the name Florence Woods Hush, in wording that is clipped and assumes the reader already knows how to tie down a mold and keep a pot at a simmer.