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Lady Abbess' Pudding
This excellent pudding is sometimes called Lady Betty's Delight. Take the thin rind of a fresh lemon, and let it soak for half an hour in half a pint of new milk, then sweeten with two table-spoonfuls of sugar. Put the whole into a saucepan, and when well heated, add two large fresh eggs and the milk of a cocoa-nut, and put the custard aside to cool. Shred four ounces of beef suet very finely, grate two ounces of a fresh cocoa-nut, and stone and mince six ounces of muscatel raisins. Cut four ounces of stale bread into thin slices. Butter a plain round mould, and stick raisins upon it in even rows. Put a slice of bread at the bottom, and place upon it a little suet, a few raisins, a little chopped lemonrind and juice, three grates of nutmeg, and a little custard, and repeat until all the ingredients are used, being careful to place bread and custard at the top. Let the pudding soak for an hour, then lay a buttered paper on the top, tie in a floured cloth, plunge into boiling water, and let it boil quickly until done enough. Turn it out carefully, and serve with the following sauce in a tureen. Mix a tea-spoonful of arrowroot very smoothly with two table-spoonfuls of cocoa-nut milk. Pour over it a quarter of a pint of boiling syrup flavoured with lemon-rind and cinnamon, stir all together until the mixture is nearly cold, then add two table-spoonfuls of cream, a few drops of vanilla essence, and a dessert-spoonful of brandy. Time to boil the pudding, three hours and a half. Probable cost, with the sauce, 1s. 8d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian boiled bread-and-suet pudding built in layers like a charlotte, with coconut running through both pudding and sauce. Nothing here is difficult, but two things — the kind of coconut milk meant, and the long boil — decide whether it works.
- Coconut milk means the water from the nut"The milk of a cocoa-nut" is the thin, clear liquid inside a fresh coconut, roughly 4-6 fl oz from an average nut. Canned coconut milk is a modern pressed-flesh product and is far too rich and thick; it will curdle the custard's balance and cloud the sauce.
- Imperial measuresHalf a pint of milk is 10 fl oz (about 1¼ US cups); a quarter-pint of syrup is 5 fl oz. "New milk" is simply fresh whole milk. A dessert-spoonful is about two teaspoons.
- Do not boil the custardThe eggs go into hot, not boiling, milk. Take the pan off the heat before whisking them in, or you will have sweet scrambled egg in lemon syrup. It should be thin enough to soak into bread — this is a soaking liquid, not a set custard.
- SuetBeef suet from a butcher needs shredding cold and fine; packet shredded suet (beef or vegetable) works directly. Four ounces to four ounces of bread is a rich ratio and is what gives the pudding its body.
- Steaming instead of the clothThe buttered paper, floured cloth and plunge into boiling water can be replaced by covering the mould with pleated parchment and foil and standing it in a covered pan of simmering water reaching halfway up. Either way, keep the water at a steady boil or simmer and top it up from the kettle so the cooking is not interrupted.
- Three and a half hoursThat is not an exaggeration for a suet pudding of this size; the fat has to melt through and the bread has to swell. What matters more is the hour's soaking beforehand, which the recipe treats as an afterthought. Skip it and the layers stay dry in the middle.
- The syrup in the sauceCassell's assumes a stock sugar syrup in the larder and gives no strength. A quarter-pint of syrup made from equal weights sugar and water, infused with a strip of lemon rind and a piece of cinnamon, is a reasonable reading. Pour it boiling onto the slaked arrowroot to thicken it, then cool before adding cream and brandy.
- Turning outThe raisins pressed into the buttered mould are the decoration, so let the pudding stand five minutes off the heat before inverting. Serve hot, sauce separately in a jug. Four to five portions, as stated.
Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery collected recipes for a late-Victorian middle-class household, and this is a good specimen of the boiled pudding at the height of its reign: stale bread, suet and dried fruit made into something worth a name. The names themselves — "Lady Abbess' Pudding", "Lady Betty's Delight" — are the period's habit of dressing up an economical dish in genteel costume, and the monastic association is decorative rather than historical; there is no documented convent behind it. What is of its moment is the coconut. Whole nuts were reaching British ports in growing quantity through the later nineteenth century, and cookery writers were finding uses for both the grated flesh and the water inside. Using that water in the custard and again in the arrowroot sauce is thrift and novelty at once — the same instinct that put stale bread at the bottom of the mould.