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Cup Puddings
Beat four ounces of butter to a cream; mix smoothly with it four ounces of fine flour, four table-spoonfuls of milk, a small pinch of salt, four ounces of picked and dried currants, and four ounces of finely-sifted sugar; beat all well together; butter seven or eight cups or small basins; a little more than half fill them, and bake in a good oven. Turn them out, and serve with wine sauce, or a little jam. Time to bake, half an hour. Probable cost, 8d. Allow one for each person.
A plain steamed-style pudding batter baked in cups rather than boiled in a cloth. The written proportions are unusually dry, so read the first two points before you start.
- The missing eggFour ounces of butter, four of flour, four of sugar and four tablespoons of milk will not produce a pourable batter, and nothing here provides lift. Many Victorian cup pudding recipes have beaten eggs added after the butter and sugar; whether one has dropped out of this text or not, as written expect a dense, shortbread-like result rather than a pudding.
- "A good oven"The book gives no temperatures. The phrase indicates an oven well heated but not fierce; in a modern oven treat that as moderate. Small cups should take about the stated half hour, but test with a skewer before that.
- Cups and basinsUse dariole moulds, individual pudding basins, or a deep muffin tin of about 4-5 fl oz capacity. Butter well and fill a little over half, as directed, so they rise without doming over the rim.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. "Picked" means gone over for stalks and grit, a step modern packaged fruit rarely needs; "dried" means patted dry after washing so they do not sink.
- Finely-sifted sugarCaster or superfine sugar. It creams into the butter more readily than granulated, which matters when there is so little liquid.
- Fine flourPlain white flour. Nineteenth-century "fine" refers to the milling and bolting, not to any self-raising blend, so no leavening is included.
- Wine sauceA period sweet sauce of butter, sugar and sherry or Madeira, thickened lightly, served hot over the turned-out puddings. Warmed jam thinned with a spoonful of water is the simpler option the recipe allows.
- YieldSeven or eight small puddings, one per person. Turn them out while still hot or the sugar at the base will set and stick.
Cup puddings belong to the large family of small baked and steamed puddings that filled out British middle-class dinners in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the closed cast-iron range made reliable oven work possible in ordinary kitchens. The point of dividing the mixture between cups was speed and portion control: a batter that would take considerably longer boiled in a basin was done in thirty minutes, and each diner received a whole pudding rather than a slice. Cassell's, first issued in the 1870s and reprinted for decades, prices almost every dish -- 8d. here -- because its readership was expected to run a household to a weekly budget, and currants were an inexpensive way to make a plain flour-and-butter mixture look like a treat. The accompanying wine sauce is the older, grander survival in the recipe, often said to be a holdover from an earlier style of pudding service that persisted long after the puddings themselves had become economical.