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Paradise Pudding
Shred four ounces of beef suet very finely, and mix with it an equal weight of finely-grated bread-crumbs, half a salt-spoonful of salt, four table-spoonfuls of moist sugar, half a salt-spoonful of grated nutmeg, the grated rind and strained juice of a fresh lemon or a bitter orange, and six large apples, chopped small. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly, then add three well-whisked eggs and a table-spoonful of brandy. Put the mixture into a buttered mould, which it must quite fill, tie a floured cloth over it, plunge it into boiling water, and let it boil quickly until it is done enough. Serve the pudding on a hot dish, with a sauce made as follows, poured over it. Put three table-spoonfuls of apple jelly into an enamelled saucepan with two table-spoonfuls of brandy. Stir them gently until the jelly is dissolved, then pour in gradually a quarter of a pint of thick cream, and stir the sauce briskly until it is on the point of boiling. It is then ready for serving. If preferred, this pudding may be baked instead of boiled. Time to boil the pudding, three hours; to bake, one hour and a half. Probable cost, ls. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A boiled suet pudding of the old school, thickened with bread rather than flour and lifted by raw apple. The method is unfussy, but the mould and the sauce both need attention.
- SuetShredded beef suet is still sold as fresh block suet at butchers, or packaged in shreds. Freeze the block and grate it if working from fresh; softened suet smears rather than shreds and the pudding loses its lightness. Vegetarian shredded suet works with a slightly denser result.
- Moist sugarVictorian "moist sugar" is unrefined or partly refined soft sugar — light brown sugar is the closest match. Four tablespoons is about 2 oz / 55 g.
- Salt-spoonfulA salt-spoon held roughly a quarter teaspoon, so half a salt-spoonful is a scant eighth of a teaspoon of salt and the same of nutmeg. Grate the nutmeg fresh; the pre-ground kind is a different, flatter spice.
- Bitter orangeThe bitter or Seville orange has a short winter season and is grown chiefly for marmalade. If you cannot find one, the lemon is the intended alternative, not a substitution.
- Filling the mouldThe instruction that the mixture "must quite fill" the mould is the hinge. A boiled pudding with an air gap takes on water at the top and turns sodden. Butter a basin the mixture will quite fill, pack it level, and tie the floured cloth taut.
- BoilingKeep the water at a steady rolling boil for the full three hours and top it up with boiling water from a kettle as it falls — adding cold water stalls the cooking. Stand the basin on a trivet, a folded cloth or an upturned saucer so it does not rattle on the pan floor.
- Baking insteadThe recipe gives only a time for baking, an hour and a half, and no temperature; a moderate oven, in the region of 350F (180C), suits that time in a buttered dish. It comes out drier and more cake-like than the boiled pudding, with a browned top.
- The sauceTake it only to the point of boiling and no further. Cream stirred into brandy and jelly will curdle if it actually boils, and the acid in the apple jelly makes that more likely, not less. The "enamelled saucepan" is specified for the same reason a modern cook reaches for stainless — bare iron discolours acidic fruit.
- YieldFive or six servings, as the original states, at a probable cost of one shilling.
Paradise pudding appears in English cookery books from the first half of the nineteenth century onward and is essentially a boiled suet pudding in which grated bread stands in for flour and raw chopped apple supplies most of the moisture — a near relation of the apple charlotte and of the older "apple pudding" family. The name is not explained by the recipes that carry it; it is generally taken as a flourish, the sort of appetising label attached to puddings alongside Cabinet, Duke of Cambridge and Empress. What it does show is how thoroughly a Victorian kitchen depended on stale bread: crumbs bound puddings, thickened sauces and stretched forcemeats. The apple-jelly-and-cream sauce is characteristic of the same period, when a jar of jelly was a pantry staple that could be turned into a hot sauce in a few minutes.