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Fat or Marrow Pudding
Rub stale bread through a wire sieve to make half a pint of fine crumbs. Pour upon these a pint and a half of boiling milk, soak awhile, then add, whilst still hot, four ounces of clarified fat, four ounces of raisins, sugar and nutmeg to taste. Beat the mixture till the fat is melted, stir in four eggs, put the pudding into a buttered mould, and boil it for three hours.
A boiled bread pudding of the older sort, enriched with marrow or clarified beef fat rather than butter. The technique is straightforward; the units and the fat need translating.
- The hinge: cool before the eggs go inThe recipe says to beat the mixture while hot so the fat melts, then stir in the eggs. Let it drop to hand-warm first, or whisk the eggs with a ladleful of the hot mixture and return it. Four eggs stirred into scalding milk will set in threads and the pudding will be grainy.
- Imperial measuresA pint here is 20 fl oz, so a pint and a half of milk is about 3 3/4 US cups. Half a pint of crumbs is about 1 1/4 US cups by volume; what that weighs depends on how dry the bread is. Either way this is a very milky mixture, and it is meant to be.
- Clarified fat and marrowFour ounces means beef marrow scooped from cracked bones, or clarified suet or beef dripping. Ask a butcher for marrow bones; the marrow should be soaked in cold water, then chopped or gently warmed. Clarified butter works and is milder, but the flavour is no longer the same pudding.
- RaisinsVictorian raisins were commonly stoned at home, and were probably drier than much modern fruit. Use ordinary raisins as sold; a brief soak in hot water or a spoonful of brandy keeps them from drawing moisture out of the custard.
- "Buttered mould" and boilingA pudding basin or metal mould, buttered heavily, filled no more than three-quarters, and covered with buttered paper and a tied cloth or foil. Boiling means standing it in a pan of water that comes two-thirds up the side, at a bare simmer, topped up with boiling water as it falls.
- TimeThree hours suits a large mould; the mixture comes to something over two pints, so allow a basin of three pints or more if it is to be filled only three-quarters. A smaller basin of part of the mixture is done in 1 1/2 to 2 hours. Test with a thin skewer: it should come out clean and the pudding should feel set at the centre, not liquid under the skin.
- Nutmeg and sugar"To taste" in a pudding of this size means about 3 to 4 tablespoons of sugar and a generous quarter-teaspoon of grated nutmeg. Grate the nutmeg fresh; pre-ground loses most of its point in a long-boiled pudding.
- Yield and servingSix to eight portions. Turn out onto a warm dish and serve with a sweet wine sauce, brandy butter, or simply cream.
Marrow puddings belong to a long English line running back well before Cassell's, when bone marrow was a standard sweet enrichment rather than an oddity — Elizabethan and Stuart cookery used it in tarts and boiled puddings much as later cooks used butter. The dish demonstrates a basic method: soaked crumbs, fat, eggs, and long boiling in a mould. The alternative title, "Fat Pudding," is the frugal version: clarified dripping saved from the roasting pan did the work when marrow bones were not to hand. That interchangeability says a good deal about a period kitchen in which rendered fats were carefully collected, clarified and stored, and in which a sweet pudding made with beef fat raised no eyebrows at all.