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Portland Pudding
Beat separately the whites and yolks of four eggs. Put the yolks into a bowl, and mix with them very gradually half a pound of dried flour. Beat the batter till it is quite free from lumps. Stir into it four ounces of moist sugar, six ounces of clarified butter, one ounce each of candied lemon and candied orange-peel, the two last being finely shredded. Add a pinch of salt, the eighth of a nutmeg, grated, one pound of stoned raisins, and last of all the whites of the eggs beaten to a firm froth. Beat the pudding five or six minutes. Pour it into a buttered basin, tie it in a cloth, and leave room for the pudding to swell. Plunge it into boiling water, and keep it boiling until it is done enough. Turn it out carefully, and serve with sweet sauce. Time to boil, five hours. Probable cost, 1s. 8d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A Victorian boiled batter pudding, closer to a very rich raisin cake than to a Christmas plum pudding: no breadcrumbs, no suet, no long maturing. A few of the ingredient names and the boiling method need translating.
- The hinge: keep the water boiling and topped upA basin pudding must stay fully immersed in water at a steady boil for the whole five hours, with a plate or trivet under it so it does not sit on the pan floor. Top up from a kettle of already-boiling water; cold water stops the cooking and can leave a sodden band through the middle.
- Dried flourPlain flour warmed in a low oven or before the fire to drive off damp, a habit from the days of flour stored in a damp larder. Modern bagged plain (all-purpose) flour needs nothing done to it; half a pound is about 1¾ cups.
- Moist sugarUnrefined soft brown sugar, damp and clumping, quite unlike the dry loaf sugar of the period. Light brown sugar is the closest match; four ounces is about ½ cup packed.
- Clarified butterButter melted and the milk solids skimmed and poured off, once used because it kept better. Six ounces of ordinary unsalted butter, melted and cooled to barely warm, does the same job here — pour it in too hot and it will cook the yolks.
- Stoned raisinsOne pound of raisins with the seeds picked out by hand; the seedless raisins sold now need no preparation and one pound is roughly 3 cups. This is a very heavy fruit load against half a pound of flour, which is why the pudding is dense and slices cleanly.
- Buttered basin, tied in a clothA large heatproof pudding basin (allow at least 2½–3 pints / about 1.5 litres for this quantity of batter and fruit), buttered, filled no more than three-quarters full for the swelling the recipe mentions. The cloth was the period's seal; a round of buttered baking paper and foil pleated across the top and tied under the rim is equivalent and easier to lift out.
- "Until it is done enough"Five hours is the given time and it is not excessive for a batter this heavy in a sealed basin. A skewer to the centre should come out clean and the pudding should feel firm and pull very slightly from the basin sides.
- Sweet sauceIn Cassell's this usually means a plain sweet pouring sauce — a thin white sauce sweetened and flavoured with lemon, brandy or wine — rather than a custard, though the book gives more than one version. Serve hot, since the pudding sets firm as it cools.
- Yield and costFive or six portions, as stated. The "1s. 8d." is a household-budget note from the original edition and has no modern equivalent worth quoting.
Boiled puddings in a cloth or basin were the workhorse sweet of the British kitchen for two centuries, chiefly because they needed no oven: a pot already on the range for the day's cooking would do, which mattered in the many houses where baking meant a trip to the local bakehouse. Cassell's, an alphabetical dictionary compiled for the late-Victorian middle-class household, carries dozens of them, and the place-name titles Portland, Cabinet, Newcastle, Manchester are largely a filing convenience rather than a claim of origin; the connection to Portland is not documented in the book and no reliable source ties this particular batter to the place. The ingredient list places it in a long tradition rather than a particular moment: candied lemon and orange peel, a whole pound of raisins and grated nutmeg had been the standard signals of a "rich" pudding for well over a century, all of them imported goods that came within reach of ordinary families as sugar and dried fruit prices fell over the course of the nineteenth century.