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Red Currant and Raspberry Pudding
Pick and wash one pound of red currants, and take the stalks off a quarter of a pound of raspberries. Make a paste as directed in CRUST, BUTTER, FOR BOILED PUDDINGS, and line a pudding-basin with it. Fill up the basin with the fruit, mixed with four ounces of moist sugar, cover with paste, and pinch the edges together neatly. Tie down the pudding in a floured cloth, plunge it into boiling water, and be careful that the water does not go off the boil until the pudding is cooked, which will be in about two and a half hours. Turn it out carefully on to a hot dish, and serve cream and sifted sugar with it. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A classic boiled fruit pudding: raw fruit and sugar sealed in a suet-style butter crust and steamed in a basin for hours until the juices turn to syrup. Nothing here is difficult, but the water level and the seal decide whether it works.
- The hinge: keep the water boilingIf the pot goes off the boil the pastry slackens and turns sodden. Keep a kettle of boiling water beside the pan and top up as the level drops, never with cold water, and keep the water well up the sides of the basin.
- Butter crust for boiled puddingsThe recipe sends you to Cassell's separate crust entry, which is not reproduced here. A butter paste for boiled puddings is generally about twice as much plain flour as butter, with a pinch of salt and cold water to bind — a stiff, rollable dough, not shortcrust.
- The cloth, or a modern lidA floured cloth was the standard seal in the period. A round of pleated baking parchment topped with pleated foil, tied under the rim with string and given a string handle, does the same job and is easier to lift out.
- Basin sizeOne pound of currants plus 4 oz raspberries and sugar suits roughly a 1½- to 2-pint (about 900 ml–1.1 litre) basin. Butter it well before lining, and leave a little headroom.
- Moist sugar"Moist sugar" is unrefined or partly refined soft brown sugar, damper and darker than modern granulated. Light muscovado is the nearest thing; caster sugar works but gives a cleaner, less caramel flavour.
- TimingTwo and a half hours at a steady boil is right for this size, and the pudding is forgiving of another fifteen minutes. Undercooking is the real risk: the crust at the base, which sits in fruit juice, needs the full time to set.
- Turning outRest the pudding five minutes off the heat before inverting, or the hot syrup will burst a weak seam. Turn it onto a deep dish rather than a flat plate — a good deal of red juice comes with it.
- Yield and servingServes four to six. Pouring cream and a dusting of sugar at the table is the period serving, and still the best one; the fruit is sharp on purpose.
Boiled puddings in a cloth-tied basin were a backbone of English domestic cookery from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onward, made possible by the pudding cloth and by the fact that a basin could hang in the same pot as the rest of the dinner. Currants and raspberries ripen together in a British garden in July, and the pairing — the currants for sharpness and pectin, the raspberries for perfume — is the same one that underlies summer pudding and many Victorian mixed-fruit jams. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, an enormous alphabetical household reference of the late nineteenth century, cross-references its crust recipes rather than repeating them, which is why this entry sends the cook off to CRUST, BUTTER. The costing of 1s. 6d. reflects the book's habit of pricing dishes for the housekeeper it addressed, in a period when soft fruit was cheap and seasonal.