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Lemon Bread Pudding, Boiled
Shred a quarter of a pound of beef suet very finely, add a pinch of salt, six ounces of finely grated bread-crumbs, a table-spoonful of flour, three table-spoonfuls of moist sugar, the finely minced rind and strained juice of a lemon, half a pint of milk, and two eggs well beaten. Mix thoroughly. Butter a plain pudding-mould rather thickly, ornament the inside with raisins, candied fruit, or sliced lemon-rind, pour in the pudding, cover it with a floured cloth, plunge it into boiling water, and let it boil quickly until done enough. Turn it out on a dish, and send to table a sauce made as follows, poured round it. Put the thin rind and juice of a lemon in half a pint of water, add two table-spoonfuls of sugar, and simmer gently over the fire for twenty minutes; add two or three drops of cochineal and a table-spoonful of gin, and it is ready to serve. Time to boil, three hours. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A Victorian boiled suet-and-breadcrumb pudding, steamed in a basin rather than baked. Most of the work is in managing the water bath for three hours without letting it go off the boil.
- The hinge: the water must never stop boilingA pudding boiled in a cloth-covered mould relies on constant, vigorous heat; if the water drops to a simmer or the level falls below the mould, the centre stays raw and heavy. Keep a kettle of boiling water alongside and top up as needed, never with cold water.
- Covering the mouldThe floured cloth is the period equivalent of a tied-down lid: flour the damp cloth so the surface gels and keeps water out. A sheet of buttered parchment plus foil, tied under the rim with string and given a pleat for expansion, does the same job and is less prone to leaking.
- Moist sugar"Moist sugar" is unrefined soft brown sugar, damp and clumping. Light muscovado is the nearest thing; granulated white will work but the pudding will be paler and less caramel-flavoured.
- Beef suetShredded beef suet is still sold in British supermarkets, packaged and floured; the quarter pound here is 115 g. If you shred it yourself from raw kidney suet, toss it with a little of the flour so it stays separate. Frozen grated butter is one common substitute, though it gives a denser crumb.
- Quantities in modern terms6 oz breadcrumbs is about 170 g; half a pint of milk in this book is 10 fl oz, or 285 ml, not the American 8 oz. The mould wants a capacity of about 1.5 pints.
- Three hours is generousThat timing suits a solid Victorian pudding basin heated in an unreliable range. On a modern steady boil a pudding this size may well be set through sooner; test with a skewer at around two hours and keep going if it comes out wet.
- Cochineal and gin in the sauceCochineal is the red colouring derived from scale insects, sold as a few drops purely for tint; ordinary red food colouring or nothing at all serves the same purpose. The tablespoon of gin goes in after the twenty minutes' simmering, so little of it cooks away.
- Turning outLet the pudding stand five minutes after lifting it from the water before inverting, or the ornamented raisins and lemon-rind pattern is more likely to stick to the mould. Serves three or four as the original says.
Boiled puddings in a cloth or basin were the backbone of English domestic sweets from the seventeenth century until gas ovens made baking cheap and predictable, and a book like Cassell's still gives dozens of them. The appeal was economic as much as culinary: suet, stale bread and milk cost very little (8d. here, for a dish feeding four), and the pudding cooked over the same fire already boiling for something else, needing no oven at all. Lemon rind and juice are doing the work that would otherwise fall to expensive spices or dried fruit, and the thin lemon-and-sugar sauce tinted with cochineal shows the late-Victorian taste for colour on the table. Cochineal was a bottle that seems often to have stood in a well-stocked store cupboard, and is said to have been used on everything from jellies to potted meats. The splash of gin is a small survival of the older habit of finishing sweet sauces with spirits, brandy being, by tradition at least, the choice in richer houses.