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Summer Pudding
Beat five table-spoonfuls of flour smoothly with a quarter of a pint of milk. Add gradually three-quarters of a pint of boiling milk, and boil the mixture, stirring it all the time, for five minutes. Pour it out, and let it become partially cool, then add two fresh eggs and half a tea-cupful of sugar. Beat the batter briskly for a few minutes, and stir in a tea-cupful of fresh summer fruit of any kind. Put the mixture into a buttered bowl, tie it securely in a floured cloth, plunge it into boiling water, and keep it boiling quickly till done enough. Turn it out, and serve immediately. Send sweet sauce or powdered sugar to table with it. Time to boil, an hour and a half. Probable cost, 9d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A boiled batter pudding rather than the bread-lined bowl of berries that now carries the name. The method is essentially a thick panada — flour cooked in milk — lightened with egg and studded with fruit.
- Imperial liquid measuresA pint here is the imperial 20 fl oz, so a quarter pint is 5 fl oz (about 150 ml) and three-quarters of a pint is 15 fl oz (about 450 ml). Five tablespoons of flour is roughly 1.5 oz / 45 g.
- The teacupfulA Victorian teacup is generally reckoned at about a third of a pint, so half a cupful of sugar is around 3 oz / 85 g, and a teacupful of fruit around 6 fl oz by volume. The measure is genuinely loose; taste the batter for sweetness before it goes into the bowl.
- The hinge: cook the flour out firstThe five minutes of hard boiling with constant stirring is what makes this pudding rather than a lumpy paste. Beat the flour to a slack cream with the cold milk, add the boiling milk in a thin stream, and keep the spoon moving against the base of the pan the whole time.
- Cool before the eggs go in"Partially cool" is vague; let it come down to lukewarm, as a rule of thumb below about 60C / 140F. Add eggs to a hot panada and they scramble in threads through the batter.
- Bowl, cloth and water levelButter the basin generously and fill it no more than two-thirds so the pudding can rise. The recipe has the basin tied up securely in a floured cloth and plunged into boiling water, so the cloth goes round the bowl rather than merely over the top; a pleated sheet of baking parchment under a foil lid is the modern substitute. Stand the basin on a trivet or folded cloth in the pan and keep the water at a fast boil, topping up from a kettle so the boil never drops.
- TimingNinety minutes suits a pudding of about this size, and the recipe otherwise says only 'till done enough'. It is cooked when a skewer comes out clean and the pudding feels springy rather than liquid at the centre. Let it stand five minutes before turning out or it may slump.
- Choice of fruitRaspberries, currants, stoned cherries or diced apricots all suit. Avoid very wet or heavily juicing fruit in quantity — it thins the batter and stains it grey-purple; if using frozen fruit, add it still frozen so it does not bleed.
- ServingFour to five portions, as stated. "Sweet sauce" in books of this period usually means a thin custard, or melted butter beaten with sugar and a little sherry or lemon; cream is no hardship.
Boiled batter and suet puddings in a cloth were a staple of English domestic sweets from the seventeenth century onward, and their names shifted freely with the seasons — a "summer pudding" in a book of this sort meant simply the plain milk-and-flour pudding brightened with whatever soft fruit was ripe, at a cost the compilers put at ninepence. The bread-lined mould packed with raspberries and currants that English cooks now call summer pudding is a later and separate dish, often traced to the invalid and spa cookery of the late nineteenth century, where it circulated as "hydropathic pudding" because it used no pastry or suet. The point being taught here is the panada, the flour-thickened milk base that also underlies soufflés and quenelles, and once a cook had it the fruit was a variable to be filled in from the garden.