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LEMON BREAD PUDDINGS, BOILED (another way)
Mix half a pound of grated bread-crumbs with a quarter of a pound of finely-shredded suet or beef marrow. Add a pinch of salt, two table-spoonfuls of sugar, the grated rind and strained juice of a fresh lemon, a table-spoonful of flour, and three well-beaten eggs. Beat for ten minutes. Divide the mixture into half a dozen balls, tie these in small floured cloths, plunge them into boiling water, and boil quickly. Serve with brandy sauce. Time to boil, one hour. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A plain Victorian boiled pudding, made light by suet and sharpened with lemon. Nothing here is difficult, but the cloth technique and the type of breadcrumb both matter more than the ingredient list suggests.
- The hinge: a fast, unbroken boil"Boil quickly" means a genuine rolling boil for the full hour, with the pan topped up from a kettle of boiling water so the puddings are never uncovered. Water that drops off the boil lets the crumb soak rather than set, and the balls turn sodden.
- Weights in modern termsHalf a pound of breadcrumbs is 225 g; a quarter pound of suet or marrow is 115 g.
- Grated bread-crumbs, not soft onesVictorian crumbs were grated from a day-or-two-old close-textured loaf and were dry and sandy. Soft crumbs pulsed from fresh sliced bread hold far more moisture and will give a pasty pudding; dry the crumbs briefly in a low oven if your bread is soft.
- Suet and beef marrowPackaged shredded suet, beef or vegetable, works directly. Marrow means the soft interior of beef leg bones, scooped out, chilled firm and chopped small; it gives a richer, more delicate pudding and is worth asking a butcher for.
- The ten minutes of beatingHand beating for ten minutes was how the eggs were worked through a heavy crumb mixture. Two to three minutes in a stand mixer on medium does the same job; the mixture should be evenly moist and slightly aerated, not liquid.
- Pudding clothsUse squares of scalded, unbleached calico or thick muslin, wrung out in boiling water and then dusted generously with flour on the inner face. The flour sets against the wet cloth to form the skin that keeps the ball intact. Tie loosely enough to allow a little swelling. Small heatproof basins or dariole moulds, covered and steamed, are a reasonable substitute, though the crust will be softer.
- Brandy sauceThe period default is either a hard sauce of creamed butter, sugar and brandy, or a pouring sauce of melted butter thickened with a little flour, sweetened and finished with brandy off the heat. Either suits; a sharp lemon pudding takes the pouring version well.
- Yield and costSix balls for four or five persons means some diners took more than one. Eightpence was the estimated ingredient cost at the time of publication and is of no use as a guide today.
Boiling a pudding in a floured cloth was the great English domestic technique of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries: it needed no oven, only a pot already on the fire, which is precisely why it flourished in kitchens where baking meant a trip to the bakehouse. Bread-crumb puddings sat at the frugal end of the family, using up stale loaf along with suet or marrow, and lemon was one way to lift them out of dullness. Cassell's gives the lemon bread pudding in more than one form, under an "another way" heading, which is characteristic of the book's method: a principle is stated and then rung through its variations, so a cook could match the dish to whatever equipment and fuel she had. The division into small individual balls, rather than one large cloth-tied pudding, shortens the boiling from several hours to one.