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Tiverton Pudding
Beat four eggs till they are very light. Mix smoothly with them three dessert-spoonfuls of fine flour, and add a table-spoonful of sugar, as much grated nutmeg and ginger as will together stand on a sixpence, and the grated rind of half a lemon. Bring a pint of milk to the point of boiling, pour it upon the mixture, and stir it briskly for a minute or two. Wring a pudding-cloth out of boiling water. Flour it well, and tie the pudding in it. Plunge it at once into boiling water, and let it boil quickly until done enough. Serve with sweet or wine sauce. Time to boil, about an hour. Probable cost, 9d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A boiled batter pudding of the plainest sort — eggs, flour, scalded milk — set in a floured cloth. The batter is unusually loose for cloth-boiling, and that is where most of the difficulty lies.
- The hinge: the cloth must be sealedWith a pint of milk to only three dessert-spoonfuls of flour, this batter is barely thicker than custard and will leak through a slack cloth. Wringing out in boiling water and flouring heavily is what forms the skin that holds it; tie the cloth tightly and drop it into water already at a rolling boil so the outside sets at once. A greased pudding basin with a tied cloth or foil lid, steamed rather than boiled, gives a far more reliable result.
- Dessert-spoonfulA Victorian dessert-spoon is between a teaspoon and a tablespoon — reckon two teaspoons. Three of them is about two level tablespoons of flour.
- "As much as will stand on a sixpence"A sixpence was a small silver coin roughly 19 mm across. The phrase means a scant pinch — call it an eighth of a teaspoon of nutmeg and ginger between them, not each.
- Pouring on the hot milkThe milk is brought only to the point of boiling, not boiled, and then poured onto the egg-and-flour mixture. Pour in a thin stream while stirring or the eggs will curdle into threads; brisk stirring for a minute or two is the whole of the technique.
- Boiling water levelKeep the pan at a steady hard boil and top up with boiling water, never cold, so the pudding is submerged throughout. A lull in the boil lets the batter settle and the pudding turns heavy at the base.
- "Until done enough"About an hour at a full boil. It is done when a skewer through the centre comes out clean and the pudding feels firm rather than sloshing when lifted. Let it rest a minute in the cloth before turning out, or it will slump.
- Wine sauceOne common sweet or wine sauce of the period is a simple thing: butter and sugar creamed and thinned with sherry or Madeira over hot water, sometimes with a spoonful of cream. The pudding itself is barely sweetened — a tablespoon of sugar for a pint of milk — so the sauce is doing the work.
- Yield and costFive or six servings, as stated, at a probable cost of 9d.
Tiverton is a market town in mid-Devon, and puddings named for English towns in Victorian dictionaries of cookery rarely come with any documented account of a local origin. What the recipe does record faithfully is the older English habit of boiling a pudding in a cloth rather than baking it — the method that predates reliable domestic ovens and that survived well into the nineteenth century in households cooking over an open range, where a pot of boiling water was always available and oven heat was not. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, a later revised issue of a work whose first version dates from the 1870s, was aimed at exactly such kitchens, which is why nearly every entry carries a probable cost and a number of persons served. A pudding of eggs, milk, a spoonful of flour and a scraping of nutmeg for ninepence was the sort of economy the book was built to demonstrate.