Home › The Principles of Cookery › Pumpkin Pudding
Pumpkin Pudding
Take a large pumpkin, pare it, and remove the seeds. Cut half of it into thin slices, and boil these gently in water until they are quite soft, then rub them through a fine sieve with the back of a wooden spoon. Measure the pulp, and with each pint put four ounces of butter, a large tea-spoonful of pounded mace, and a small nutmeg, grated. Stir the mixture briskly for a minute or two, then add the third of a pint of hot milk and four well-beaten eggs. A glassful of wine may be added or not. Pour the pudding into a buttered dish, and bake in a moderate oven for about an hour. Probable cost, uncertain. It will be sufficient for five or six persons.
A crustless baked pumpkin custard, closer to the filling of an American pumpkin pie than to a British steamed pudding. Two things decide whether it succeeds: how dry you get the pulp, and how gently you bake it.
- Drain the pulp hardBoiled pumpkin carries an enormous amount of water, and the sieved pulp will slacken the custard until it weeps in the dish. Let it drain in a sieve or press it in a cloth before measuring, or steam or roast the slices instead of boiling them.
- Imperial pintsCassell's is a British book, so a pint here is 20 fl oz, not 16. One pint of drained pulp is roughly 1 lb 4 oz; the third of a pint of hot milk is about 6-7 fl oz.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350F/180C, though the book gives no temperatures at all. An egg custard baked much hotter is liable to curdle, or to puff and then collapse; a water bath is worth using even though the original does not call for one.
- An hour is a guide, not a ruleDepth of dish matters more than the clock. The pudding is done when the edge is set and the centre still trembles slightly under a tap; it firms as it cools.
- The mace and nutmegA large teaspoon of pounded mace plus a whole grated nutmeg per pint is a very heavy hand by modern taste. Half those quantities gives a spicing recognisable to most palates, and pre-ground mace is milder than freshly pounded blade.
- No sugarThe recipe genuinely contains none, and the only sweetening on offer is the glass of wine, which is itself optional. Anyone expecting pie filling should add 3-4 oz sugar per pint of pulp.
- A glassful of wineA wineglass in Victorian recipe books is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz. Sherry, madeira or a sweet white would all suit; some of the alcohol bakes off, leaving sweetness and acidity.
- YieldFive or six as written. The recipe names no dish size, only 'a buttered dish'; the mixture comes to roughly two pints, so allow headroom.
Pumpkin belongs to the New World squashes carried back to Europe in the sixteenth century, and by the Victorian period it was grown in British kitchen gardens, more often boiled, mashed or made into pies than served whole. Cassell's dictionaries of cookery, compiled as comprehensive household references, gather such dishes alongside far more familiar ones, and the entry admits its cost is "uncertain". The heavy mace-and-nutmeg spicing and the optional glass of wine suggest an older English style of sweet custard pudding, the same treatment given to carrot, though the American pumpkin pie tradition was developing in parallel across the Atlantic.