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PUMPKIN PUDDING (another way) (Cut a pumpkin into square)
Cut a pumpkin into square pieces, and stir these over the fire in a saucepan until they become soft. If they are now found to be too moist, squeeze them in a cloth to get rid of some of the water. Then put the pulp in a stewpan with some butter, and fry it. When done, mix a spoonful of arrowroot in milk, sweetened with sugar, and simmer the whole until it becomes reduced to a proper consistency. Then let it become cold, and thicken with three eggs, beaten up with a small quantity of water. Afterwards butter the inside of a stewpan, cover it with bread-crumbs, and put the cooked pumpkin into it. Place the pan over some hot cinders, put the lid on, and throw some embers on top of it. When the pudding is browned send it to table.
A Victorian steamed-then-browned pumpkin pudding, closer to a sweet crumb-lined charlotte than to American pumpkin pie. The method assumes an open hearth and a lidded stewpan buried in embers; almost everything else translates directly.
- The hinge: drive off the waterPumpkin is mostly water, and the recipe allows for it: squeeze in a cloth if the pulp is still wet, then fry in butter. If the pulp is still slack when the eggs go in, the pudding will weep and refuse to set. Cook it down until a spoon drawn through the pan leaves a clear track.
- Cooking it without a fireA buttered, crumbed stewpan set on cinders with embers piled on the lid is a Dutch oven. Use a buttered dish or a heavy lidded casserole in a 350F oven, lid on for the first 30-40 minutes, then uncovered until the top browns.
- "Stewpan" and "saucepan"Both mean a lidded metal pan set over the fire, not the modern baked casserole dish. Here the pan is set on cinders with embers heaped on the lid rather than on a stovetop.
- Quantities are not givenThe original names no weights at all. For a medium pumpkin yielding about 2 lb of cooked pulp, roughly 2 oz butter, 1 tablespoon arrowroot slaked in half a cup of milk, and sugar to taste will match the intent; the three eggs are the only fixed figure.
- ArrowrootStill sold, and worth using rather than cornflour here — it sets clear and slightly glossy and does not dull the flavour. Slake it in cold milk before it meets heat or it will go lumpy.
- Cool before the eggsThe instruction to let the mixture go cold is not optional. Beaten egg stirred into a hot pumpkin base scrambles, and you will taste it in the finished pudding.
- Season it yourselfNo spice is specified. Cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg or lemon zest all suit it, and the pudding is bland without something.
- Yield and servingServing -- "Send to table" means hot, straight from the pan, with cream or a thin custard.
Pumpkins reached Europe from the Americas in the sixteenth century and were long treated in England as a cheap, watery vegetable to be improved by butter, sugar and eggs — which is exactly what happens here. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in late nineteenth-century London, gathered several versions of most dishes side by side, hence "another way"; in this one the vegetable is reduced in a stewpan and bound with arrowroot rather than baked in a crust. The crumb-lined pan and the embers on the lid describe a technique generally traced to hearth cookery well before the closed range: bottom heat from the fire, top heat from coals heaped on the lid, which is how a household browned a pudding without an oven. The absence of spice is telling — the warm cinnamon-and-clove profile now inseparable from pumpkin is largely an American development.