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Canary Pudding
Beat up four ounces of butter before the fire until it is nearly melted; dredge in half a pound of flour and a quarter of a pound of castor sugar, and add four eggs well beaten. Chop up some candied lemon-peel very fine, and add it to the mixture, with the juice of half a lemon. Pour into a buttered mould, and steam or boil for two hours. Probable cost, 8d.
A plain steamed sponge in the Victorian manner: no leavening, no liquid beyond eggs and lemon juice, and a long steam that does the work of an oven. A few points make the difference between a light pudding and a heavy one.
- Softening the butter"Before the fire until nearly melted" means very soft but not liquid — the state butter reaches in a warm kitchen. Melted butter will not hold air and the pudding turns dense; work it to a soft paste and cream it with the sugar before the flour goes in.
- Castor sugarCaster (superfine) sugar. Ordinary granulated works but creams less readily; a few seconds in a food processor gives the right grain.
- The ratio, and leaveningHalf a pound of flour to four ounces of butter and four eggs is a stiff, flour-heavy batter by modern standards, and the original relies wholly on beaten eggs for lift. Later versions of the same pudding use self-raising flour or add about 1½ teaspoons baking powder; without it, beat the eggs in thoroughly and expect a close, firm crumb.
- Candied peel"Some" is unquantified. Two ounces, chopped fine, is a reasonable amount for this quantity of batter; too much and it tends to sink.
- Mould and coveringA buttered basin or mould of about 1½–2 pints (roughly 850 ml–1.1 litres), filled no more than two-thirds. Cover with buttered parchment and foil, pleated across the centre to allow the pudding to rise, and tie under the rim.
- Steam or boilSteaming means the basin sits on a trivet in a covered pan with water halfway up the sides; boiling means fully immersed with the cloth or foil tied watertight. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up with boiling water so the pan never runs dry.
- TimeThe recipe's two hours is generous; a 1½-pint basin may be done in about 1½ hours — a skewer into the centre should come out clean and the top should spring back.
- Yield and servingServes six. Turn out after five minutes' rest and serve with lemon or jam sauce.
- "Probable cost, 8d"Eight old pence, from an era when Cassell's priced every dish for the household accounts. It is a note on Victorian marketing, not a figure that converts usefully.
Canary pudding is one of a large family of Victorian steamed sponges distinguished mainly by flavouring, and the name is generally taken to describe the colour — the pale yellow the eggs, butter and lemon give the finished pudding — rather than any connection with the islands. It belongs to the sort of cookery a coal range made easy: a pot of simmering water on the hob would carry a pudding through two hours unattended while the oven was busy with the roast, which is why the steamed pudding, not the cake, was the everyday British sweet course well into the twentieth century. The same base method yields ginger, marmalade, or jam versions with a single substitution.