Home › The Principles of Cookery › Nonesuch Pudding
Nonesuch Pudding
Grate the rind of a large fresh lemon upon three ounces of loaf sugar; crush the latter to powder, and mix it with four ounces of dried flour. Beat a quarter of a pound of fresh butter to a cream. Add gradually and smoothly the sugar and flour, two ounces of raisins, stoned and chopped small, and five eggs well-beaten. Mix thoroughly, and pour the pudding into a buttered mould; plunge it into boiling water, turn it out before serving, and send some good custard or wine sauce to table with it. Time to boil, two hours. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A late-Victorian boiled pudding of the plainest construction: butter, sugar, flour and eggs, lifted by lemon oil. The technique that matters is the one the recipe assumes you already know — sealing the mould so water cannot get in.
- Seal the mouldButter the mould, then cover it tightly with buttered baking parchment and foil tied under the rim, or use a pudding basin with a clipped lid. A batter this loose and unleavened will take on water and turn to paste if the seal fails.
- Loaf sugar and the lemonLoaf sugar was hard refined sugar broken from a cone; the point of grating the rind onto it is that the lumps abrade the zest and absorb the oil. Rub the zest into 3 oz (about 6 tablespoons) of granulated sugar with your fingers for the same effect, then use it as caster sugar.
- Dried flourFlour was spread in a warm oven or before the fire to drive off moisture, since sacked flour was damp and variable. Modern packaged flour needs no drying; weigh 4 oz (about 115 g, close to 1 cup plain flour) and move on.
- No raising agentThere is none, and none is intended. The five eggs, well beaten, are the entire lift, so beat the butter genuinely pale and creamy and fold the eggs in gradually to keep the air in.
- Boiling versus steaming"Plunge it into boiling water" means a covered pan with water reaching two-thirds up the mould, kept at a steady simmer rather than a rolling boil, and topped up from a kettle so it never drops. Steaming in a covered pan on a trivet gives the same result with less risk of flooding.
- Two hoursThe full two hours is right for a pudding of this size in one mould; test with a skewer to the centre, which should come out clean. In several small dariole moulds it will need considerably less time, so begin testing early.
- Turning outLet it stand five minutes off the heat before inverting, or the outside shears away. Loosen the edge with a knife tip first.
- Wine sauceThe period wine sauce is sherry or Madeira warmed with sugar and butter, sometimes thickened with a little egg; a pouring custard is the alternative offered here. Either wants to be thin enough to flood the plate.
- Yield and costThree or four servings, as stated. The shilling is the book's usual 'probable cost' note, useful only as a marker of how modest the dish was.
The name is the whole conceit: "nonesuch" or "nonsuch" meant unequalled, and Victorian cookery books used it the way they used "paradise" and "queen" — as a flattering label for a dish of ordinary materials, in this case a small creamed pudding whose only luxury is five eggs and the oil of one lemon. Boiled and moulded puddings of this type filled pages of nineteenth-century English books because the equipment was a basin, a cloth and a pot of water, available in kitchens that had no reliable oven; Cassell's, published in parts from the 1870s and endlessly reissued, catalogued dozens of them with a "probable cost" and a number served so a household could budget. The instruction to grate lemon rind onto sugar is older than the book by a long way and seems to appear in eighteenth-century receipts, a practical way of capturing citrus oil.