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Muffins, Pudding Of
Beat six eggs for ten minutes, lay three muffins and two crumpets into a bowl, and pour over them three breakfast-capfuls of boiling milk, flavoured with lemon-peel, and sweetened with loaf sugar. Mix when cold, and add a glassful of brandy, two ounces of sweet almonds, blanched and chopped small, and the beaten eggs; half a pound of stoned muscatels, or dried cherries, may be added, and the whole should be well stirred before being put into the buttered basin for boiling, or into a dish lined with puff-paste, if the pudding is preferred baked. Time one hour to bake or boil. Sufficient for five or six persons. Probable cost, 2s., exclusive of brandy.
A Victorian bread-and-butter pudding in disguise, built on stale griddle goods rather than loaf bread. Most of what needs translating here is vocabulary and vessels.
- Muffins means English muffinsThe yeast-raised, griddle-baked rounds, not the American quick-bread muffin. Split them, and use them a day or two stale so they drink the milk without collapsing to paste.
- CrumpetsGenuine crumpets, holed and spongy, are the point: they absorb custard faster than the muffins do. If unavailable, use two more English muffins and expect a slightly firmer set.
- "Three breakfast-capfuls"Almost certainly a misprint for breakfast-cupfuls, an informal measure of roughly 8-10 fl oz each, so something in the region of 3 to 3-3/4 cups of milk. The measure is genuinely loose; pour enough hot milk to soak the bread through with a little standing free, and no more.
- Loaf sugarSugar broken from a refined cone and crushed. Ordinary granulated or caster sugar is the direct equivalent; about 3 to 4 oz suits this quantity.
- Sweet almonds and muscatels"Sweet" almonds are simply ordinary almonds, named to distinguish them from bitter almonds, which are not used. Muscatels are large muscat raisins, sold on the stem in this period and needing their seeds picked out; seedless raisins need no stoning.
- A glassful of brandyTaken as a wineglass, usually reckoned at about 2 to 2-1/2 fl oz in this period. Add it to the cooled milk, not the hot, as the recipe directs.
- Beating the eggsTen minutes reflects hand whisking. Two to three minutes with an electric beater, until pale and thickened, does the same work. Add them only once the soaked mixture is cold, as the recipe insists, or they will scramble.
- Boiled or bakedFor the boiled version, fill a buttered pudding basin no more than three-quarters full, cover with pleated foil or a tied cloth, and boil or steam it in water for the hour given. Baked in a puff-paste-lined dish, the recipe specifies no oven heat; a moderate oven of around 350F for the same hour.
- YieldFive or six as written, and it wants a pouring cream or a brandy sauce alongside.
Puddings built from stale baked goods sit at the thrifty heart of English cookery, and by the time Cassell's compiled its dictionary in the 1870s and 80s the genre had branched well beyond plain bread and butter: muffins, crumpets, sponge cakes, ratafias and macaroons all had puddings named after them. The luxuries stacked on this one, brandy, chopped almonds, muscatel raisins, lemon peel, mark it as a middle-class dinner dish rather than a nursery leftover, and the costing tells the same story: two shillings, a figure the book states is exclusive of the brandy. The offer of either boiling in a basin or baking in a puff-paste case is characteristic of the period, when puddings were often said to be cooked over the fire as readily as in an oven.