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Rum Pudding
Grate three ounces of stale bread-crumbs, and pour over them as much rum as will moisten them. When they are well soaked, beat them up with six ounces of sugar, a little grated nutmeg, and first the yolks, and afterwards the well-whisked whites, of four eggs. Pour the mixture into a buttered mould, and let it steam until done enough. Turn it upon a hot dish, pour half a tumblerful of rum over it, set light to this, and serve immediately. Time to steam the pudding, one hour. Probable cost, 8d., exclusive of the rum. Sufficient for three persons.
A small steamed bread-and-egg pudding, closer to a soufflé than to a suet pudding, finished at the table with burning rum. The instructions leave two things vague — how much rum soaks the crumbs and how you steam it — so both are worth settling before you start.
- Weigh the crumbsThree ounces is about 85 g, or roughly 1½ cups of loosely packed fresh-grated crumbs from a stale open-crumbed loaf. Use bread that has genuinely dried a day or two; fresh soft bread turns to paste and the pudding sets heavy.
- "As much rum as will moisten them"In practice 4 to 6 tablespoons (60–90 ml) will damp 3 oz of crumbs without leaving a puddle. The crumbs should be soaked through but not swimming — any excess liquid will keep the pudding from setting.
- Six ounces of sugar is a lotThat is about 170 g against 85 g of bread, which by modern palates is very sweet. Cutting to 3–4 oz (85–115 g) gives a pudding that still sets and lets the rum and nutmeg show.
- Fold, don't beat, the whitesThe whites are the only leavening here. Beat them to soft peaks and fold them in in two additions. The recipe's single verb "beat" appears to cover the whites as well as the yolks, but folding is the safer modern practice for keeping the air in.
- The mouldAllow a basin or charlotte mould of at least 1½ pints (900 ml); with four whisked whites folded in, the mixture is bulkier than the ingredient weights suggest. Butter it well and line the base with a disc of buttered paper. Cover the top with buttered parchment or foil pleated across the middle, tied or crimped, so condensation cannot fall in and slack the mixture.
- SteamingStand the covered mould on a trivet or folded cloth in a deep pan, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, cover the pan and keep the water at a bare simmer for the stated hour. Top up with boiling water as needed. A skewer to the centre should come out clean and the pudding should have shrunk slightly from the sides before you turn it out.
- Turning outLet it stand five minutes off the heat before inverting, or the egg-set edges tear. Serve it on a warmed dish — a cold plate chills the base and dulls the flambé.
- The flaming rumHalf a tumblerful is roughly 4 fl oz (120 ml). Warm it in a small pan until just steaming — cold spirit is much harder to light — then pour over and light it away from the pan, extractor fan off and nothing overhanging. Serve while the flame is still running.
- YieldThree portions, as stated, and they are modest. Doubling works, but you will need a mould of around 3 pints and closer to 1½ hours of steaming.
Bread-crumb puddings of this kind were the thrifty backbone of Victorian sweet cookery: stale bread, eggs, sugar and a flavouring, steamed in a mould and turned out with some ceremony. Cassell's gives the probable cost as eightpence "exclusive of the rum" — the pudding itself is pennies, and the spirit poured over it at the table is the extravagance. Rum was widely available in nineteenth-century Britain through the West India trade, though it carried heavy duty, and flaming a dish with spirit was a well-established piece of dining-room theatre by the 1870s, most famously with the Christmas plum pudding. The dictionary's habit of quoting a cost per dish reflects its intended reader: a mistress of a modest household costing out a dinner, for whom a pudding that looked like an occasion but ate into the housekeeping only slightly was exactly the thing.