Home › The Principles of Cookery › Aunt Alice's Pudding
Aunt Alice's Pudding
Place a little jam at the bottom of pie-dish. Mix three table-spoonfuls of bread-crumbs, one table-spoonful of sugar, a little chopped lemon-rind, the juice of half a lemon with two eggs, and a tea-cupful of milk. Pour it over the jam, and bake in a good oven. A very nice pudding may be made by substituting pieces of stale bread for the bread-crumbs. Soak two or three pieces in the milk, beat well with a fork, and add the other ingredients. Time to bake, three-quarters of an hour. Sufficient for five or six persons. Probable cost, 8d.
A Victorian nursery pudding of the queen-of-puddings family, stripped to its simplest form. The quantities are small and the custard is set entirely by the eggs, so the oven temperature matters more than the timing.
- The teacupfulA Victorian tea-cup is around 5 fl oz (150 ml), not the modern 8 oz measuring cup. With two eggs to that much milk the mixture is closer to a soft baked custard than a milk pudding.
- "A good oven"The book gives no temperatures. For an egg-and-milk mixture like this a moderate heat, in the region of 350F (175C), is the safe reading; anything hotter and the custard will curdle and weep at the edges before the middle sets.
- Bread-crumbsUse dry, fine white crumbs from stale bread, not the coarse toasted crumbs sold in packets, which stay gritty. Three tablespoons is a light hand: the crumbs are there to thicken, not to make a bread pudding.
- The jam layerSpread it thin over the base of the dish and let the custard mixture go on gently over the back of a spoon, or the jam will churn up into the eggs and the finished pudding will be muddy rather than layered.
- Lemon rindChop only the yellow zest; the white pith turns bitter in a baked custard. A strip pared with a peeler and minced fine is easier than grating this small a quantity.
- Timing and the testThree-quarters of an hour suits a small pie-dish at a moderate heat. Judge by the set rather than the clock: the centre should wobble as a single mass and a knife slipped in at the edge should come out clean. A dish of water in the oven, or a bain-marie, guards against overcooking.
- The stale-bread versionSoaking two or three pieces of stale bread in the milk and beating them with a fork gives a coarser, more substantial pudding. Let the bread soak until it collapses before beating.
- YieldFive or six Victorian servings; by current portions this is a modest pudding for three or four, baked in a dish of about 1 pint capacity.
Puddings named for an aunt, a grandmother or a village were a stock convention of nineteenth-century cookery books: the name signalled homeliness and thrift rather than any particular person, and similar dishes appear elsewhere under other family labels. The structure here -- jam under a lemon-scented bread-and-egg custard -- is close to that of queen of puddings, which adds a meringue on top. The costing of 8d. is characteristic of Cassell's, which gives a probable cost for nearly every dish so that a household could compare what came out of the larder against what came out of the purse. That eggs, milk, stale bread and a spoonful of jam could feed five or six for eight pence is a fair picture of how such puddings earned their place at the end of a weekday dinner.