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Bermuda Pudding
Put a pint and a half of fresh juicy fruit--raspberries, strawberries, or red currants--into a jar with some sugar, and two table-spoonfuls of water. Cover the jar, set it in a cool oven, and let it remain until the juice flows freely, when it may be strained off. For a pint of juice put three table-spoonfuls of Bermuda arrowroot into a cup and mix it to a smooth paste with a tea-cupful of cold water, or fruit juice if it is to be had. Pour the boiling fruit upon it, stir it well, then put the mixture back into the saucepan, and stir again until it is quite thick. Take it off the fire and add cochineal to improve the colour. Pour the preparation into a damp mould, and leave it until the next day. Turn it out on a glass dish and serve with milk or cream.
A fruit-juice mould thickened with arrowroot rather than gelatine — essentially a summer blancmange. It succeeds or fails on the ratio of starch to juice and on not scorching the mixture once it thickens.
- The hinge: starch to juiceThree tablespoons of arrowroot to a pint of juice gives a mould firm enough to turn out but still soft on the spoon. Less and it slumps on the dish; more and it turns gluey and opaque. Measure the strained juice before you measure the arrowroot.
- Bermuda arrowrootThe Bermudian crop was the prestige grade of the period and commanded a premium; plain West Indian arrowroot from any supermarket behaves identically. Do not substitute cornflour, which sets cloudy and tastes raw unless boiled hard, exactly what arrowroot must not do.
- Do not boil the thickened mixtureArrowroot clears and thickens just below boiling and then thins again if held at a rolling boil. Take it off the heat as soon as it is thick and glossy.
- A cool ovenThe recipe gives no temperature and no time; the jar is only there to sweat the juice out of the fruit gently, and the instruction is simply to leave it until the juice flows freely. A covered pan over the lowest possible heat does the same job.
- Pints and cupsA British pint is 20 fl oz, so a pint and a half of fruit is roughly 30 fl oz by volume — very roughly a pound to a pound and a quarter of berries or currants. The "tea-cupful" of cold water is usually reckoned at about a quarter pint, 5 fl oz.
- Sugar is left to youNo quantity is given because it depended on the fruit. Start at 3–4 oz per pound of berries for strawberries or raspberries, more like 6 oz for red currants, and taste the strained juice before thickening — sweetness cannot be adjusted once it sets.
- CochinealSold then as a liquid colouring made from the dried insect. It is still available as carmine, though the colour can equally be left as the fruit made it; red currants in particular give plenty on their own.
- The mouldRinsing the mould with cold water and leaving it wet is what lets the pudding release. Leave it until the next day as directed; arrowroot needs to cool thoroughly before it will hold its shape.
- YieldAbout a pint and a quarter of finished pudding, serving four with cream.
Arrowroot puddings ran through nineteenth-century English cookery as the light, digestible end of the dessert repertoire — food for invalids and children as much as for the dinner table — and Bermuda arrowroot was the name that carried authority. The island exported the starch, milled from Maranta arundinacea rhizomes, through the 1800s, and its reputation for whiteness and delicacy was strong enough that "Bermuda" functioned as a quality mark in British grocers' lists and, as here, in recipe titles. The dish itself is a fruit-juice version of the standard moulded blancmange, and the instruction to strain the juice off rather than crush the fruit through is what gives it the translucency the period admired. The dash of cochineal at the end tells you the aesthetic: Victorian cooks expected a red pudding to be emphatically red.