Home › The Principles of Cookery › Alderman's Pudding
Alderman's Pudding
Pour three pints of boiling milk over six table-spoonfuls of finely-grated bread-crumbs, and soak for half an hour. Shred finely six ounces of firm beef suet; mix with it a heaped table-spoonful of stoned raisins and another of currants; add a little sugar and grated nutmeg, and the rind of half a lemon chopped finely. Mix these ingredients together with five eggs well beaten. Line the edges of a shallow pie-dish with good crust, place the pudding in it, and bake. It is also very nice steamed. Time to bake, forty minutes; to steam, two hours. Sufficient for six or eight persons. Probable cost, 2s.
A baked or steamed bread-and-suet custard of the plainest Victorian kind. One proportion in the original needs thinking about before you start.
- The milk-to-crumb ratio is the problemThe milk-to-crumb ratio is worth thinking about before you start — three imperial pints is 60 fl oz, a little over seven US cups, poured over six tablespoons of crumbs. That is unlikely to thicken into much, even with five eggs. Either the crumb quantity is larger than printed or the milk should be nearer a pint; the text gives no way of telling which. Judge by consistency: after soaking you want a thick, spoonable batter, not milk with specks in it.
- Oven heatCassell's gives no temperature, and this recipe does not even specify a "moderate oven"; it just says bake. A baked bread-and-egg pudding of this sort is usually given a moderate heat, somewhere around 325-350F, and the stated forty minutes suits a shallow dish. Much hotter and the custard risks curdling at the edges before the centre sets.
- SuetSix ounces of firm beef suet means the hard fat from around the kidneys, shredded fine. Packaged shredded suet (beef or vegetarian) is the direct substitute by weight. Frozen butter grated on the coarse side works but gives a denser, less open crumb.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. They are sold alongside raisins and sultanas.
- "Stoned raisins"Nineteenth-century raisins arrived with seeds in and had to be pitted by hand. Modern seedless raisins need nothing done to them.
- The crustOnly the rim of the dish is lined, as a decorative and protective edge rather than a base. Shortcrust, rolled thin, pressed round the lip. If you steam the pudding instead, leave the pastry out altogether.
- SteamingTwo hours in a buttered basin, covered with pleated parchment and foil and tied, with the water kept at a bare simmer and topped up from a kettle. The steamed version is heavier and closer to a plain suet pudding.
- Yield and costSix to eight portions, as stated. The 2s. is the 1870s market price for the whole dish and is of historical interest only.
Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery gathered hundreds of these plain nursery and family puddings in the 1870s, when a household cook was expected to produce something sweet after dinner from bread, milk, eggs and suet. The name is traditional rather than documented: aldermen, the senior officers of an English borough or City ward, were a byword for civic dinners and heavy eating, and their name was attached half-affectionately to a number of rich dishes. Confusingly, other Victorian books are said to give quite a different Alderman's pudding, so the title travelled further than any single recipe. What this version really records is the economy of bread-crumb cookery: stale bread revived with boiling milk was the backbone of English puddings long before flour-based sponges took over, and suet did the work that butter does now because it was cheaper and kept better in an unrefrigerated larder.