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French Pudding
Mix six ounces of marrow, two ounces each of flour, bread-crumbs, chopped apples, dried cherries, and candied peel, three ounces of sugar, half an ounce of ginger, and the grated rind of a lemon. Moisten with four eggs and a gill of cream, and boil three hours.
A Victorian boiled pudding of the plum-pudding family, made rich with beef marrow rather than suet. The method is barely sketched, so the vessel and the water are left to the cook.
- MarrowSix ounces of raw beef bone marrow, scraped from cracked leg bones and picked free of splinters, then chopped fine while cold. Butchers will saw marrow bones on request; shredded beef suet is the usual stand-in, though it gives a firmer, less silky crumb.
- A gillIn a British book of this date a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, or about 142 ml. American readers should take it as a generous half-cup.
- The ginger is ambiguousHalf an ounce of ground ginger is roughly two and a half tablespoons, which would dominate the whole pudding. The quantity reads more easily as chopped preserved or candied ginger; if you want dry ginger, work by taste rather than by this weight.
- Boiling, in practiceButter a 2-pint basin, fill it no more than three-quarters, cover with buttered paper and a tied cloth, and stand it on a trivet or folded cloth in a pan of simmering water reaching halfway up. Keep it at a bare simmer and top up with boiling water so the level never drops; three hours of hard rolling boil will drive water past the cloth.
- Steaming insteadThree hours in a covered steamer gives much the same result with less watching. The pudding is done when a skewer comes out clean and the top has domed.
- Dried cherriesDried fruit, not glacé; a modern dried sour cherry is the closest stand-in. Soak them ten minutes in warm water or a spoonful of brandy if they are leathery.
- Yield and servingEnough for six small helpings. Turn out while hot and send it up with a sweet sauce or hard sauce; the marrow sets firm as it cools, so a cold slice is best fried in butter.
Boiled puddings bound with marrow rather than suet were a mark of luxury in nineteenth-century English cookery, marrow being the same prized fat that went into marrow toast, marrow dumplings and the older marrow-bone pies. The name "French pudding" here says little about France, and a marrow pudding studded with candied peel and dried cherries would have seemed richer or more delicate than the plain English version. Its brevity is characteristic of the dictionary format, which assumed every reader already knew how to tie a pudding cloth and keep a pot at a simmer for an afternoon. The recipe belongs to a whole vanished class of boiled sweet puddings.