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Mother Eve's Pudding
Take of sliced apple, well-washed currants, grated bread, and finely-shredded suet, each twelve ounces, mix them in a bowl, with half the rind of a lemon, minced, and moisten with four well-beaten eggs. Boil in a buttered mould, and serve with a sweet sauce, as follows. Sweeten a quarter of a pint of melted butter, add nutmeg, a large glassful of sherry, and part of the juice of a lemon. Time, three hours to boil. Probable cost. 1s. 8d., exclusive of wine. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A boiled suet pudding built on equal weights of four things, which makes it easy to scale up or down. The chief adjustment is to modern expectations of what "melted butter" means and how long a pudding basin can safely sit over water.
- The proportionsTwelve ounces each of apple, currants, breadcrumbs and suet — 3 lb of mixture in total, bound with four eggs. Halve everything for a modest basin; the ratio is the recipe, and it holds at any size.
- Grated breadThis means fresh breadcrumbs from a stale-ish crumb, grated on a box grater, not dried packet crumbs. Dry crumbs absorb far more moisture and will give a dense, pasty pudding.
- SuetShredded beef suet from a butcher, or packet shredded suet, both work. Vegetable suet is a straight substitution here; butter is not, as it melts out before the crumb sets.
- Buttered mouldA pudding basin, buttered heavily and covered with pleated greaseproof paper and foil, or a lid, tied under the rim. Set it on a trivet or folded cloth in a pan of simmering water reaching halfway up, and top up with boiling water as it falls — three hours of simmering will take a surprising amount.
- Three hours is rightUnlike many old boiling times, this one is not an exaggeration. A pudding of this bulk needs the full three hours to cook the suet through and to give the currants and apple time to collapse into the crumb.
- "Melted butter" as a sauceIn Victorian usage this is a made sauce, not simply butter melted in a pan: butter worked with a little flour and water into a smooth, pourable coating sauce. A quarter of a pint is 5 fl oz. Modern cooks generally get better results pouring over a plain custard or a butter-and-sugar hard sauce instead.
- A large glassful of sherryPeriod wine-glass measures ran to about 2 fl oz, so a large glassful is perhaps 2 to 3 fl oz. Use a medium or cream sherry; add it off the heat so it does not curdle a butter sauce.
- Yield and costThe original gives five or six servings, which is honest for a pudding this rich. The 1s 8d is the cost as the book itself reckons it, and it is worth reading as a reminder that suet and currants were cheap bulk, while the wine was reckoned separately as a luxury.
Eve's pudding takes its name from the apple, and the dish is often traced to eighteenth-century England, where a rhyming version circulated; the verse gives six eggs, six ounces of bread and of currants, and half a dozen apples, though the wording and quantities vary between printings. Cassell's version keeps the equal-weights logic of the rhyme while replacing the count with ounces. It belongs to the great family of boiled suet puddings that ran from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth, cooked in a cloth or a basin over the same fire as the rest of dinner. Worth noting that the modern British "Eve's pudding" is a different thing entirely: a baked dish of apples under a sponge topping, which took the older name after boiled puddings fell out of fashion.