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Hasty Pudding
Put a pint and a half of milk into a saucepan, add a pinch of salt, and, when the milk is just boiling up, sprinkle some fine flour with the left hand, and beat well with a fork with the right, to keep the flour from getting in lumps. Continue until the pudding is like a stiff thick batter, which it will be when about half a pound of flour has been used. Let it boil five or six minutes longer, beating it all the time; then turn it into a dish with two or three ounces of fresh butter, and serve immediately. Unless the milk is quite boiling when the flour is first put in no amount of boiling afterwards will prevent the pudding tasting pasty. Treacle, sugar, thick cream, or jam may be eaten with this pudding. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A flour-and-milk pudding that lives or dies on the temperature of the milk. Everything else is stirring.
- The hingeThe milk must be at a full rolling boil the moment the flour goes in, as the book insists. Flour added to milk that is merely steaming hydrates without gelatinising cleanly, and the pudding keeps a raw, pasty taste no matter how long it cooks afterwards.
- Imperial measuresA pint and a half of British milk is 30 fl oz, or about 3¾ US cups. Half a pound of flour is roughly 1¾ cups of modern all-purpose flour, though you should add it by eye and stop when the batter is stiff rather than measuring it out in advance.
- \"Fine flour\""Fine flour" -- Plain white flour, sifted. The term distinguished it from wholemeal and from the coarser household grades; ordinary all-purpose flour will do.
- Sprinkling and beatingThe two-handed technique described is the whole trick: a thin rain of flour into liquid that is being beaten constantly. A balloon whisk works better than the fork, and a sieve or dredger in the other hand better than fingers.
- Pan and heatUse a heavy-based saucepan and drop the heat once the flour is in. The five or six minutes of further boiling cooks out the starch, but a thick batter scorches quickly on a thin pan, and the beating must not stop.
- TreacleBlack treacle is close to blackstrap molasses; golden syrup was a sweeter alternative available in the period. The book says only that treacle, sugar, cream or jam may be eaten with the pudding, without specifying how they were served.
- Butter and servingThe two or three ounces of butter (about 4 to 6 tablespoons) go in at the end, as the pudding is turned into its dish, and melt through it. It stiffens and skins fast, hence "serve immediately." Five or six portions, as stated.
- Probable costSixpence for a dish feeding five or six is the point of the recipe. The book gives a probable cost for its dishes, and this is a notably cheap one.
Hasty pudding is a long-established dish in English domestic cookery, generally said to be named for the speed with which it could be made from flour, milk and salt without eggs, suet or an oven. Recipes of this shape appear in English printed cookbooks from the seventeenth century onward, and the dish was common nursery and supper food through the nineteenth. Confusingly, the same name crossed the Atlantic and attached itself to a cornmeal mush, which is the hasty pudding of American usage and of the Harvard club named for it.