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Radical Pudding
Weigh four eggs in the shell. Take their weight in butter, half melt it, and beat it to a cream. Add the eggs well-beaten, two table-spoonfuls of sugar, two-thirds of the weight of the eggs in flour, and a little lemon or almond flavouring. Mix the ingredients thoroughly, pour the mixture into a buttered mould. Lay a round of buttered paper on the top, tie the mould in a cloth, plunge it into fast-boiling water, and either boil or steam it till done. Turn it out carefully, and serve with pudding sauce. Time to boil, a little more than an hour. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A weight-of-eggs steamed sponge, closer to a boiled pound cake than to a suet pudding. The whole thing turns on getting the butter to the right consistency before anything else goes in.
- Half melt it, and beat it to a creamThe butter should be soft and pliable, not liquid — warm it barely, then beat until pale and aerated. There is no baking powder here, so the air you work into the butter and the well-beaten eggs is the only lift the pudding gets. Melted butter will give you a heavy, greasy result.
- What the weights come toA large egg in the shell runs about 2 oz, so four eggs give roughly 8 oz of butter and, at two-thirds, about 5.3 oz of flour. Weigh your own eggs rather than assuming; the proportion is the point of the recipe.
- Two tablespoonfuls of sugarThat is around 1 oz, very little for a modern palate. The recipe's own direction to serve it with pudding sauce suggests the sweetness was expected to come from the sauce; served plain it will taste barely sweet.
- FlavouringUse lemon zest or a teaspoon of lemon or almond extract. Nineteenth-century "almond flavouring" sometimes meant bitter almond essence; buy ordinary culinary almond extract.
- The mouldA 2-pint pudding basin, well buttered, filled no more than two-thirds. The buttered paper and cloth of the original are replaced by a pleated round of baking parchment and foil, tied under the rim — the pleat gives the pudding room to rise.
- Boiling versus steamingThe original plunges the tied mould straight into fast-boiling water. In a modern kitchen boiling can mean the basin standing in water that comes two-thirds up its side; steaming means it sits above the water on a trivet. Either way the water must stay at a steady boil, and top up only with boiling water from a kettle.
- Time and testingThe original gives a little more than an hour; reckon on 1 to 1.25 hours for a basin this size. It is done when a skewer through the centre comes out clean and the sponge has shrunk very slightly from the sides.
- Turning out and sauceLet it stand five minutes before inverting, or it may crack. "Pudding sauce" here means a sweet white sauce, a wine or brandy sauce, or a thin pouring custard — something sweeter than the pudding itself.
- YieldFive or six, as the original says, cut in wedges from the basin.
Cassell's belongs to the great Victorian run of household dictionaries, and its pudding pages are full of dishes carrying all manner of names. The label rarely carries any real political meaning; whatever its origin, it served to distinguish one plain steamed sponge from the dozens of others in the same chapter. The formula underneath it is much older and entirely serious: weigh the eggs, match them in butter, and take a fixed fraction in flour. That proportional method — the same logic behind pound cake and the French quatre-quarts — let a cook scale a batter up or down by balancing against the eggs themselves, and it survived in English kitchens long after standardised measures were available.