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Bernese Pudding
Beat up the yolks and whites of two eggs with a quarter of a pint of milk, and add two ounces of very fine bread-crumbs and the same quantity of flour; take a quarter of a pound of suet, finely shredded, the same of mixed candied peel, chopped, the rind and juice of a lemon, the quarter of a small nutmeg grated, and equal quantities of sugar and currants. Mix these ingredients for ten minutes, and put them aside for an hour. Stir all round, pour into a buttered pudding-dish, and lay a floured cloth over the top. Place it in boiling water and boil for three hours and a half. Serve with sugar over the top. Probable cost, 1s. 3d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A standard Victorian boiled suet pudding under a continental name. The method is sound; the quantities need interpretation in two places.
- The missing amount"Equal quantities of sugar and currants" gives no weight at all. Reading it against the rest of the list, 4 oz of each (matching the suet and peel) produces a balanced pudding; 2 oz of each gives a leaner, more bready one. This is genuinely ambiguous in the original.
- Imperial measuresA quarter of a pint is 5 fl oz British, about 2/3 cup. Two ounces of breadcrumbs is a generous cup of fresh crumbs, or about half that by volume if dried fine.
- SuetBeef suet, shredded fine or grated from the block. Packet shredded suet, beef or vegetable, works directly. If starting from raw kidney suet, chill it hard and grate rather than chop, and pick out the membrane.
- The hour's restThe crumbs and flour have time to absorb the milk and egg before boiling, which is the likely reason the mixture is stood aside; the recipe's instruction to 'stir all round' afterwards fits a mixture that has settled.
- Covering and the water levelA floured cloth alone is the older method; a sheet of buttered parchment under a cloth or foil, tied under the rim with string, is more reliable. Water should come halfway up the basin and be kept simmering and topped up from a boiling kettle for the whole time — if it drops below the batter line the upper part cooks slowly and unevenly.
- Three and a half hoursNot an exaggeration for a suet pudding of this size, though a modern 1-pint basin will be done nearer 2 to 2 1/2 hours. Test with a skewer to the centre; it should come out clean and hot.
- Candied peelVictorian mixed peel was commonly citron, orange and lemon, often sold in whole caps and chopped at home. Supermarket diced peel is generally sweeter and softer — worth reducing the added sugar slightly, or buying whole candied citron peel if available.
- ServingSugar over the top is the plain finish. Three or four is honest for the quantity given; a hard sauce, custard or lemon sauce turns it into a dinner pudding for six.
Cassell's, like most late-Victorian household dictionaries, carried dozens of boiled suet puddings distinguished mainly by their names — Bernese, Vienna and the like — where the label signalled fashionable Continental cachet rather than any real provenance. Little in this recipe is Swiss: suet, breadcrumbs, currants, candied peel, lemon and nutmeg are the standard English pudding vocabulary of the period, and much the same list turns up under other titles. What the name does mark is the era's appetite for the alpine and the touristic; Bern and the Bernese Oberland are generally said to have been fixed points on the British traveller's route by the 1870s, and kitchens borrowed the label freely. The technique itself is older and thoroughly domestic: batter or crumb mixtures boiled in a cloth-covered basin were the workhorse sweet course of a coal-range household, since a pudding could sit over the same fire that was cooking everything else for three hours without attention beyond topping up the water.