Home › The Principles of Cookery › Marmalade, Orange, Pudding
Marmalade, Orange, Pudding
Beat up two eggs, mix with them a quarter of a pint of new milk, and a quarter of a pound of good moist sugar; beat together for five minutes. Prepare some bread-crumbs by rubbing the stale crumb through a wire sieve, rejecting the crust. Of these crumbs take a quarter of a pound, with rather more than their weight of good suet. Mix with the eggs and milk, and work the mixture until smooth. Fill a buttered tin mould with the mixture and alternate layers of orange marmalade, and bake in a moderate oven. The excellence of this pudding will greatly depend on the mixing of the ingredients. Time, one hour and three-quarters to bake. To beat the mixture, twenty-five minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. One pound of marmalade is sufficient for this pudding.
A Victorian baked suet pudding, richer than it first looks: the suet outweighs the breadcrumbs. A few conversions and one structural note will get it out of the oven intact.
- The hinge is the beatingThe original says the excellence depends on the mixing, and the time note allows twenty-five minutes for it: prolonged hand-beating aerates the egg-and-sugar base and works the suet evenly through the crumbs. A few minutes in a stand mixer will stand in for most of that labour.
- Quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about 150 ml — not the 4 fl oz an American reader would assume. "New milk" is simply fresh whole milk, unskimmed.
- Moist sugarVictorian "good moist sugar" is soft brown sugar, damp and unrefined rather than the dry white loaf sugar of the period. Light muscovado is the closest match.
- SuetRather more than 4 oz of crumbs means about 5 oz (140 g) of shredded suet. Packet beef or vegetable suet works directly; if you are chopping fresh suet, strip the membrane and shred it cold with a little flour.
- BreadcrumbsStale crumb rubbed through a sieve gives fine, dry crumbs — a food processor and a day-old loaf, crusts off, is the same thing. Fresh soft bread makes the pudding heavy.
- Moderate oven350F / 175C. At an hour and three-quarters the top will colour long before the centre sets, so cover loosely with foil after about 45 minutes and test with a skewer.
- Layering the marmaladeA pound of marmalade is a great deal for a mixture this size, and the layers will sink unless they are thin and the mixture is spooned, not poured, over each one. Butter the tin heavily and line the base — the sugar in the marmalade catches.
- YieldA pound of marmalade and four ounces each of crumbs and sugar will need a mould of roughly 2 pints (1.2 litres) and serves six to eight. The recipe names no accompaniment; custard or thin cream would be the usual choice.
Marmalade reached English kitchens as a name long before it meant oranges: the word comes from the Portuguese marmelada, a stiff quince paste, and for a couple of centuries an English marmalade could be made of almost any fruit boiled to a solid. The bitter Seville orange version, loose enough to spoon and cheap enough to keep in the store cupboard, is a product of Scottish and then industrial preserving in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and by the time Cassell's was compiled a pound jar was an ordinary thing to have on hand. That abundance is what this pudding depends on. It belongs to the large Victorian family of suet puddings built from bread, sugar and fat, in which the preserve does all the flavouring work — the same logic as jam roly-poly or a cabinet pudding. The costing at 1s. 6d. is characteristic of the book, which priced almost every dish so that a household could judge it against the week's budget.