Home › The Principles of Cookery › Fig Pudding
Fig Pudding
Take equal quantities of flour and bread-crumbs, three ounces of each, shred two ounces of suet very finely, mix together and add two ounces of apples weighed after being pared and chopped, four ounces of figs cut up small, and a heaped table-spoonful of sugar, with sufficient milk to make the paste firm, not wet. Put it into a buttered mould, press closely together, and tie down with a cloth. Steam for three hours. Serve with wine sauce or melted butter. Probable cost, 6d. Leave room for the pudding to swell in the mould
A small, plain steamed pudding of the kind Cassell's expected a cook to turn out on a weekday. Everything is measured by weight, which makes it easy to scale, and the whole batter comes to about a pint.
- The mould size is the hingeThe final line is the important one: leave the mixture room to swell in the mould, so the basin should be comfortably larger than the quantity of mixture, which will rise as the suet melts and the crumbs swell.
- SuetBeef suet, shredded fine on a coarse grater; buy it from a butcher or use packaged shredded suet, including the vegetable kind. Frozen butter grated on the large holes is the usual stand-in, but the pudding will be softer and less open in texture.
- FigsDried figs, not fresh. Snip off the hard stem ends before chopping, and cut them small — pieces much bigger than a pea sink and clump in a batter this stiff.
- "Sufficient milk"Expect roughly 4 to 6 tablespoons. Stop as soon as the mixture holds together in a mass: the recipe specifies a paste that is firm, not wet, and it is pressed closely into the mould rather than poured.
- No egg, no raising agentThis is deliberately a plain pudding, so it will be close-textured rather than light. An egg beaten into it, with the milk reduced accordingly, gives a lighter result if you want one, but it is no longer this recipe.
- Covering the mouldFor the cloth, substitute a pleated round of buttered baking parchment topped with pleated foil, tied under the rim with string. The pleat gives the pudding room; the seal keeps steam out of it.
- SteamingThree hours in a covered pan with the water halfway up the basin. Keep the water at a steady simmer and top it up with boiling water so it never runs dry.
- The sauces"Melted butter" in a book of this date means a thin flour-thickened butter sauce, not simply butter melted in a pan. Wine sauce would typically be a sweetened fortified-wine sauce, lightly thickened and served hot.
- YieldFour modest servings. The "probable cost, 6d" is a Victorian household costing, useful only as a signal that this was a cheap dish.
Steamed suet puddings were the backbone of British sweet cookery through the nineteenth century, sitting over a pan on the hob for hours while other work went on, and endlessly variable according to what dried fruit was in the store cupboard. Figs reached British kitchens in quantity as dried imports from the Mediterranean. The dish is best known now from the wassail line "now bring us some figgy pudding", though whether that pudding was actually a fig pudding is uncertain; fig puddings are often said to belong to the same family as the richer Christmas pudding — this one simply leaves out the eggs, brandy and dried vine fruits, and relies on apple for moisture. It is the sort of recipe printed less to impress than to be worked through on a Tuesday.