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Newcastle Pudding
Butter the inside of a pint basin, and fill it with thin slices of stale bread and butter sprinkled with white sugar and grated lemon. Make a custard by mixing half a pint of new milk with two well-beaten eggs. Flavour this also with lemon. Pour the custard over the bread, lay a buttered paper on the top, and steam it very gently for about an hour. Turn out carefully, and serve with fruit or lemon syrup.
A steamed bread-and-butter pudding in miniature, and about as forgiving as that sounds. The only real risk is heat: too vigorous a steam and the custard curdles rather than sets.
- Gentle steam is the hingeKeep the water at a bare tremble, never a rolling boil, and top up with boiling water as it evaporates. A pint basin of custard set over hard-boiling water will scramble at the edges and weep when turned out.
- Pint basinAn imperial pint is 20 imperial fl oz, about 570 ml, so a basin of roughly 600 ml (a scant 1¼ US pints) is the right size. It should be filled generously but not to the rim, as the custard swells slightly.
- The buttered paperThis is the period's cover for a steamed pudding. Buttered parchment, or parchment under a sheet of foil, pleated across the middle and tied under the rim, does the same job of keeping condensation off the surface.
- New milkSimply fresh whole milk, unskimmed and not soured. Whole milk is right; skimmed gives a thin, watery set.
- Grated lemonLemon zest, taken off with a fine grater or microplane and stopping at the white pith. "Flavour this also with lemon" means a little more zest in the custard, or a few drops of lemon extract.
- Stale breadDay-old white bread with some structure to it. Fresh soft sliced bread collapses into paste and the pudding will not hold its shape when unmoulded.
- Testing and timingAn hour is about right for this size, but judge by the custard: set to the centre with only a faint wobble, around 175F if you check with a probe. Let it stand five to ten minutes before turning out so it firms up.
- YieldA pint basin serves two generously or three modestly. Fruit syrup, or lemon syrup made by dissolving sugar in lemon juice and a little water, is poured over at table.
Steamed puddings in a buttered basin were the backbone of British domestic sweets through the nineteenth century, cheap in fuel because they could sit over a pot already on the range and forgiving of a cook with other work to do. This one is a small, thrifty relation of bread-and-butter pudding: stale bread, butter, sugar, two eggs and a half-pint of milk, the sort of dish that turned the end of a loaf into a course. Names of towns and counties were attached freely to such puddings in Victorian cookery books, and the label "Newcastle" here is likely a convention of the genre rather than evidence of a traceable local origin.