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COLLEGE PUDDINGS, BAKED (small)
These puddings, which are generally served fried, as in the previous recipe, are much nicer baked. When this is done, they should have another egg, or a table-spoonful of milk added to make them lighter. Pour the mixture into well-buttered cups, and bake in a moderate oven for about twenty minutes. Before serving, turn the puddings out of the cups, and sift a little pounded sugar over them. Probable cost, 1s. 1d. Sufficient for eight puddings.
A variation note rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes the college pudding mixture from the preceding entry, which in Cassell's is the usual suet-and-breadcrumb batter with currants, sugar and spice bound with egg. These notes cover what changes when you bake it.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350F (175C). At that heat small buttered moulds will be set and lightly domed in about 20 minutes; test with a skewer at 18 minutes, since a suet mixture dries out quickly once past done.
- "Cups"Dariole moulds, small ramekins or a deep muffin tin, filled about three-quarters full. Butter them heavily and, if the mixture is rich in fruit, dust the butter with a little flour or sugar so the puddings release cleanly.
- The extra egg or milkThis is the point of the entry. A mixture stiff enough to hold together in hot fat will bake heavy, so the additional egg or tablespoon of milk is not optional slack. Add it before the fruit and aim for a batter that drops reluctantly from the spoon.
- SuetThe preceding recipe is not reproduced here, but college puddings of this type are normally built on shredded beef suet. Packet shredded suet, vegetable or beef, works directly; if using suet from the butcher, chill it hard and grate it, discarding membrane. Butter can be substituted but gives a cakier, less open crumb.
- Pounded sugarSugar crushed fine in a mortar, which is caster or superfine sugar today. Sift it over the hot puddings so it clings.
- Turning outLet the puddings stand two or three minutes in the moulds before inverting. Straight from the oven they are fragile; left much longer the butter sets and they stick.
- Yield and costThe book gives "sufficient for eight puddings," a count of moulds rather than a number of eaters. The "probable cost, 1s. 1d." belongs to the book's own costing system and does not translate to any modern price.
- ServingThey want moisture: a jug of custard, a sweet wine sauce, or warmed jam. Baked versions are drier than the fried original, which came out of the pan glossy with fat.
College puddings take their name from the Oxford and Cambridge colleges, where individual boiled or fried suet puddings are traditionally said to have been served to students from at least the seventeenth century; the name appears in English cookery books long before Cassell's, sometimes as "New College pudding." The mixture is essentially a small-format plum pudding, suet, breadcrumbs, dried fruit and spice, made in single portions so that it cooks in minutes rather than hours, and the older versions were fried in a pan of hot fat or dripping. This entry pushes the baked version as "much nicer," without giving any further reason. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for middle-class households running on a budget, routinely prices each dish and states its yield, which is why a recipe of a few lines ends with a shilling and a penny.