Home › The Principles of Cookery › Puritan's Pudding
Puritan's Pudding
Grate three ounces of stale crumb of bread, put it into a bowl, with a pinch of salt, the eighth part of a nutmeg, grated, an ounce of the kernel of a fresh cocoa-nut, finely grated, two table-spoonfuls of powdered and sifted sugar, and an inch of thin lemon-rind. Mix these ingredients well together, then pour over them a pint of milk, which has been beaten up with two well-whisked eggs. Let the crumbs soak for two hours or more. Beat the mixture well with a fork, pour it into a dish, and bake in a moderate oven. Time to bake, half an hour. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A baked bread-and-milk custard, lightly perfumed with coconut, nutmeg and lemon. The soaking is the part that matters; everything else is straightforward.
- Let it soak properlyTwo hours is not padding. Stale crumb needs that long to swell and dissolve into the milk, and a pudding baked after twenty minutes will have a gritty crumb layer at the bottom and thin custard above.
- A moderate oven350F/175C. For a custard of this kind 325F/160C and a shallow tray of hot water round the dish gives a smoother set; at the higher heat watch the last ten minutes, as the egg will curdle before the top browns if it is pushed.
- Weights and volumesThree ounces of crumb is about 85 g, roughly two cups loosely grated. A pint here is an imperial pint, 20 fl oz / 570 ml, not the American 16 oz.
- Stale crumb of breadCrust removed, from a plain white loaf a day or two old, grated rather than cubed. Ready-made dried breadcrumbs are too fine and too dry; they will turn the pudding pasty.
- The cocoa-nutAn ounce (30 g) of freshly grated coconut flesh. Unsweetened desiccated coconut substitutes at the same weight, but it is drier and will absorb more of the milk, so allow for a slightly stiffer set.
- Lemon-rindA strip of peel pared thin enough to carry no white pith. It is there to flavour the soaking milk, and is best lifted out before the mixture goes into the dish, since nobody wants to find it in a spoonful.
- NutmegAn eighth of a whole nutmeg is a generous pinch, near a quarter teaspoon grated. Use whole nutmeg rather than pre-ground, whose aroma fades with keeping.
- Testing and servingDone when the centre is set with only a faint wobble and a knife inserted off-centre comes out clean. It serves three or four, warm rather than hot, and takes cream or a spoonful of jam.
- Probable cost, 8dEight old pence, from the pre-decimal shilling of twelve pence. Cassell's quoted prices as a guide to household budgeting rather than as any use to a modern shopper.
The name reads more like Victorian shorthand for plainness than any real link to seventeenth-century Puritans: a plain pudding of bread, milk and eggs, set against the richer boiled and suet puddings elsewhere in the book. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, issued in parts in the 1870s and reissued in successive new editions, was aimed at a middle-class household that watched the housekeeping book, which is why entries of this kind carry a probable cost and a number of persons served. Bread puddings of this type were a common use for stale loaf ends in a kitchen with no refrigeration and daily bread deliveries. The coconut is the least expected ingredient here: by the later nineteenth century whole nuts were reaching British ports in quantity from the West Indies and Ceylon, cheap enough that a recipe could call for an ounce grated from a fresh one.