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Madeira Pudding
The beauty of this pudding depends on contrasting well the colours of the jams. Make a good butter or suet crust; roll it out thinly, cut into rounds--the size of the tin in which you intend to boil the pudding--several pieces of crust; put at the bottom of the tin a layer of crust, then one of light-coloured jam--say greengage--then another layer of crust, then a red jam, and so on until the tin is filled. Boil the pudding in a cloth for two hours and a half, turn it out very carefully, and before serving sift a little white sugar over it. The tin should have a loose bottom, so that the pudding can slip out easily. It must be well buttered first.
A layered suet-crust pudding whose whole point is the striping, so the assembly matters more than the cooking. Two things need translating for a modern kitchen: the tin with a loose bottom, and the two and a half hours in a cloth.
- The hinge: thin crust, thick jamRoll the rounds thinner than feels right, around 3mm, and be generous with the jam. Thick pastry layers swell in the steam and swallow the contrast in colour that the recipe is built around.
- Butter or suet crustSuet crust is usually 2 parts self-raising flour to 1 part shredded suet by weight, bound with cold water to a soft dough; with plain flour add 2 teaspoons baking powder per 250g. A butter crust is generally made to similar proportions with cold grated butter in place of the suet.
- The tinA Victorian pudding tin with a loose bottom is closest to a deep, straight-sided cake tin or a charlotte mould. A 1.2-litre pudding basin can be substituted if buttered thoroughly; the loose base is a convenience, not a requirement.
- Boiled in a cloth means covered and steamedBoiled in a cloth -- With a tin, the cloth was most likely tied over the top to keep water out rather than wrapped round the whole pudding, though the wording does not settle it. For a modern kitchen, cover with buttered baking paper and foil, pleated, tied under the rim, and stand the tin on a trivet in a pan of simmering water reaching halfway up; this steams rather than boils, but is the closest practical equivalent. Top up with boiling water as it drops.
- TimeTwo and a half hours at a bare simmer, as the recipe directs, and it is not worth shortening; the layers need time to set enough to hold their shape.
- Jams for the coloursGreengage jam is now a specialist item. For the pale layer use apricot, gooseberry or quince; for the red use raspberry, damson or blackcurrant. Choose set, thick preserves rather than runny conserves, which will bleed between layers.
- Turning outRest the pudding five minutes before inverting, and do it onto a warmed plate in one movement. The sifted white sugar goes on at the last moment, or it dissolves into the surface.
- YieldA 1.2-litre pudding serves six, with custard or cream.
Cassell's belonged to the great age of the English boiled pudding, when a cloth, a pan of water and a mutton-suet crust could produce a hot dish at the end of any dinner without needing an oven. This one is a version of what is sometimes called a layer or ribbon pudding, prized for cutting into visible stripes at table -- a small piece of kitchen theatre made possible by the growing availability of cheap factory jams in the later part of the century, when a household could reasonably keep two or three colours of preserve on the shelf at once. The name is a puzzle: there is no Madeira in it. Puddings and cakes of the period were often named for the wine served alongside rather than any wine in the mixture, and Madeira cake is generally explained the same way, though the connection is traditional rather than documented. The instruction to use a tin with a loose bottom is a reminder of how much Victorian cookery depended on specialised tinware that has largely disappeared from domestic kitchens.