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Middleton Pudding
Make a rich batter with two table-spoonfuls of flour, a pint of new milk, a little salt, two dessert-spoonfuls of good moist sugar, and the whole of eight eggs, well beaten, first separately and then together. Flavour with nutmeg and the grated rind of a lemon. Boil in a floured cloth, leaving space to swell. Serve with wine or other pudding sauce. Time, two hours to boil. Probable cost, 1s. 4d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
An egg-heavy boiled batter pudding — closer to a baked custard than to anything you would call batter today. The proportions are the whole point: eight eggs to two tablespoons of flour means the set comes almost entirely from egg, so the heat has to stay gentle.
- Keep the water at a bare simmerWith this much egg and almost no flour, a hard rolling boil will curdle the mixture and squeeze water out of it. Hold the pot at a lazy simmer and top up with boiling water so the level never drops below the pudding.
- Cloth versus basinA floured cloth works for stiff suet and flour puddings; this mixture is thin enough to risk seeping through the weave before it sets. A well-buttered pudding basin, covered with buttered paper and then a tied cloth, is the safer vessel, though the recipe as written calls for a cloth.
- "Leaving space to swell"Fill a basin no more than three-quarters, or tie a cloth loosely enough to give the pudding an inch of room. Egg batter rises considerably before it firms.
- New milkMilk fresh from the cow, unskimmed and unhomogenised. Whole milk is the substitute; a splash of cream in place of some of the milk gets closer to the original richness.
- Moist sugarUnrefined sugar still damp with molasses — light brown sugar is the nearest thing. Two dessertspoons is about two rounded teaspoons each, so roughly 4 teaspoons in total: this is a barely sweet pudding, which is why it is served with a sweet sauce.
- Two hours is generousDepending on the depth of the vessel, the pudding may well be set before the full two hours. Test with a skewer at the centre rather than relying on the clock; overcooking an egg custard of this kind can make it rubbery and weeping.
- Wine saucePudding wine sauces of the period were commonly butter and sugar with sherry or Madeira warmed together without boiling. A plain sweetened cream or a lemon sauce suits it equally well.
- Yield and costFour or five servings, as stated. The 1s. 4d. is a Victorian household costing, useful only as a reminder that eight eggs made this a comparatively expensive pudding.
Boiled puddings tied in a floured cloth were a mainstay of English domestic sweets from the seventeenth century onward, because a household with one fire and a hanging pot could produce them without an oven. The name is the ordinary Victorian habit of attaching a place or family to a formula -- Middleton is a common English place name and a common surname, and no particular source for the attribution is documented, so it is best read as a house recipe that acquired a label rather than a dish with an origin. What the ingredient list really records is the point at which a batter pudding stops being a batter: two spoonfuls of flour do little more than keep eight eggs from splitting, and the result belongs beside boiled custards and cabinet puddings.