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PRUNE PUDDING (another way)
Beat a tea-cupful of flour to a smooth paste with a little cold milk. Add two well-beaten eggs, a pinch of salt, and as much milk as will make a rather thick batter. Wash half a pound of prunes, and simmer them in a little water till they are quite soft. Drain off the liquid, take out the stones, sprinkle a little flour over the prunes, and then stir them into the batter. Dip a cloth into boiling water, wring it well, and dredge a little flour over it. Pour the mixture into it, and tie it securely, but leave a little room for the pudding to swell. Plunge it into boiling water, and keep the pudding boiling until it is done enough. Serve with sweet sauce. Time to boil, two hours. Probable cost, 7d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A plain boiled batter pudding with stewed prunes folded through — closer to a clootie or spotted dick in method than to anything baked. The whole thing stands or falls on the cloth being floured properly and the water never going off the boil.
- The hinge: a dry, floured cloth skinScald the cloth, wring it out hard, then dredge a little flour over the inside surface, as the recipe directs. The flour absorbs water and sets into a thin paste skin that helps keep the batter from leaching out. A damp cloth with no flour gives a sodden, disintegrating pudding.
- Keep it at a rolling boilThe pan must stay at a full boil for the whole two hours, and the pudding must stay submerged. Top up with boiling water from a kettle, never cold, or the batter stops setting and the pudding sinks into a heavy layer.
- A teacupful of flourVictorian teacups ran small — roughly 5 to 6 fl oz, which is about 3 oz / 85 g of flour. The measure is genuinely imprecise, so judge by the batter: thick enough to coat a spoon heavily and drop reluctantly, not pourable.
- Half a pound of prunesThat is 225 g, weighed dry with stones in. Modern pitted prunes are already soft and only need 10 minutes' simmering, not the longer stewing the original assumes for older, harder dried fruit.
- Why the fruit is flouredDusting the drained prunes with flour stops them sliding to the bottom of the batter during the long boil. Do it after they are well drained and cooled a little, or the flour turns to gum.
- No sugar in the batterThe pudding itself is unsweetened — all the sweetness comes from the fruit and the sauce. "Sweet sauce" here means a simple sugar-and-butter sauce, a thin custard, or the reserved prune liquid boiled down with sugar.
- A basin instead of a clothThe same batter works in a buttered pudding basin, covered with pleated greaseproof and foil and steamed rather than boiled. Allow at least the two hours given, and possibly a little longer, since steaming is gentler than boiling; leave the same headroom for rising.
- Yield and costFive or six servings, as stated. The "7d" is the price in pre-decimal pence — a marker of how cheap a pudding this was meant to be.
Boiled puddings tied in a cloth were the backbone of English domestic cooking from the seventeenth century onward, made possible by nothing more than a pot of water over the fire — no oven required, which mattered in kitchens where the oven was a weekly event and the range was not. Cassell's turns to prune puddings because dried plums were among the cheapest sweet things in a Victorian larder: imported in quantity from France, keeping well, and reliably sweet in a season when fresh fruit was not. The "another way" in the title signals a batter version set against other treatments elsewhere in the book, and its costing at sevenpence for six people places it squarely in the economical end of the dictionary, where the aim was to feed a household well on very little.