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Orange and Batter Pudding
Mix four table-spoonfuls of flour smoothly and gradually with half a pint of cold milk; add two fresh eggs, thoroughly whisked, a pinch of salt, a table-spoonful of moist sugar, and a quarter of an ounce of oiled butter. Pour the batter into a buttered basin which it will quite fill, dredge a little flour over it, tie it in a floured cloth, plunge it into boiling water, and keep it boiling until it is done enough. If more water must be put in, let it be boiling. Let the pudding stand two or three minutes after it is taken out of the water before it is turned out of the mould. Place it on a hot dish, and before sending to table empty a half-pound jar of orange marmalade over it. The batter is better if made two or three hours before it is wanted. Time to boil, an hour and a half. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for four persons.
A plain boiled batter pudding, turned out and drowned in marmalade. The technique is Victorian steamed-pudding practice, and the details of the cloth and the boiling water are what keep it from going soggy.
- The hinge: the water must never go off the boilA batter pudding sets by steady heat; if the pan drops below boiling, or cold water is added to top it up, the batter slumps and turns heavy. Keep a kettle of boiling water alongside and replenish from that. The recipe says to plunge the basin into boiling water and to top up only with boiling water; it gives no water level.
- Half a pintImperial measure, so 10 fl oz, or about 1¼ US cups of milk. The four tablespoons of flour are likewise generous imperial spoons; expect roughly 2 oz / 55 g of flour to that quantity of milk.
- Oiled butterNot an oil, but butter melted gently until liquid and clear rather than browned. A quarter ounce is about 7 g, roughly one and a half teaspoons.
- Moist sugarDamp unrefined sugar, brown and slightly sticky. Light brown soft sugar is the closest thing on a modern shelf; granulated will work but gives a paler, blander pudding.
- The floured clothA scalded cotton or linen cloth, wrung out, floured on the inside face and tied over the basin with string, with the corners knotted on top. The flour forms a seal that keeps boiling water out. Modern practice substitutes pleated baking parchment and foil, which does the same job with less drama.
- Fill the basin, and butter it wellA batter pudding wants no headroom to speak of; the recipe says the batter should quite fill the basin. Butter every crease of the basin or it will not turn out cleanly.
- Resting the batterThe two or three hours the recipe recommends let the starch hydrate, and it genuinely improves the texture. Overnight in the refrigerator is fine; whisk again before pouring.
- Timing and donenessAn hour and a half at a steady boil for a pudding of this size. It is done when a skewer through the centre comes out clean and the pudding pulls very slightly from the basin sides.
- Yield and the marmaladeFour servings, as stated. Half a pound of marmalade is about 225 g, which is a whole small jar; warm it slightly so it pours rather than sits in a lump.
Boiled batter puddings belong to the older English pudding tradition, in which a cloth and a pot of water did the work an oven does now — useful in a kitchen with one fire and no reliable oven heat, and the reason so many nineteenth-century puddings are boiled or steamed rather than baked. The batter is itself a teaching exercise: flour worked smoothly into cold milk, eggs beaten separately, the whole rested before cooking. The marmalade poured over at the last moment is the cheap Victorian flourish. Seville orange marmalade was, by the second half of the century, widely available commercially and sold by the jar, and the recipe is costed at one shilling for four people. Note that the marmalade is not cooked into the pudding at all; it is a sauce, and treating it as one is the point.