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Trinity College Pudding
Mince four ounces of cold boiled tongue very finely, and mix with it eight ounces of finely-shredded suet, eight ounces of grated bread-crumbs, a quarter of a pound of stoned raisins, a quarter of a pound of picked and dried currants, a quarter of a pound of moist sugar, two ounces of shredded candied peel, a small table-spoonful of flour, and a little salt and mixed spice. Mix these ingredients thoroughly, and make them into a paste by stirring in with them the well-beaten yolks of four eggs, the white of one, and a glassful of brandy. Turn the pudding into a buttered shape which it will quite fill, cover it with a cloth, plunge it into boiling water, and boil quickly until done enough. Turn it out carefully before serving. Time to boil, about three hours. Probable cost, 1s. 10d., exclusive of the brandy. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A boiled suet pudding of the older sort, in which minced meat still sits alongside the dried fruit. Nothing here is difficult, but the vessel and the boiling need attention.
- The hinge: keep the water boiling and topped upThe pudding cooks by steam and conducted heat from water at a rolling boil for the full three hours. Keep a kettle going and top up with boiling water only; a lapse to cold water stalls the cooking and can make the pudding heavy and sodden.
- "A buttered shape which it will quite fill"A pudding basin or metal mould of about 1.5 litres (2.5 pints), heavily buttered. The mixture should fill it; unlike a steamed sponge there is no raising agent to allow for, so no headspace is needed.
- Cover it properlyThe recipe says only to cover it with a cloth, tied on. A pleated round of baking parchment under pleated foil, tied with string, does the same job and keeps water out. Stand the basin on a trivet or folded cloth in the pan; the recipe has the pudding plunged into boiling water, so the water should come well up the sides.
- Cold boiled tongueTongue, salted, boiled and pressed, was a familiar cold-larder item in better-off Victorian households, though the recipe does not say which animal's. Ready-cooked tongue is sold at good butchers and delicatessens; four ounces is about 115 g, minced as finely as you can manage so it disappears into the fruit.
- SuetEight ounces (225 g) of beef suet, shredded. Packet shredded suet works directly; a block of fresh beef suet should be grated frozen. Vegetable suet is a workable substitute in the same weight.
- Moist sugar and mixed spiceMoist sugar is unrefined soft brown sugar, so use light or dark muscovado. Mixed spice is the British blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, coriander and clove; a rounded teaspoon suits this quantity.
- A glassful of brandyA wine glass in period cookery books runs to roughly 2 fl oz (60 ml). This is a flavouring quantity, not a soaking one.
- Turning outLet the pudding stand five minutes off the heat before inverting, so it settles and pulls from the sides. Loosen the edge with a thin knife first.
- Yield and servingThe stated four or five is a Victorian estimate; a 1.5 litre pudding this rich will serve six to eight now. Brandy butter, a hard sauce, or plain cream is the usual accompaniment.
Puddings named for Cambridge and Oxford colleges were a stock feature of nineteenth-century English cookery books, the name generally signalling a rich boiled or baked pudding of the kind served at high table rather than any documented college recipe. What marks this one out is the tongue: minced meat in a sweet fruit pudding is the direct survival of medieval and Tudor mincemeat, which combined beef or mutton with suet, dried fruit, sugar and spice as a matter of course. By the time Cassell's dictionary appeared in the 1870s that habit was in retreat, and mincemeat was increasingly made without meat except for the suet; recipes like this preserved the older balance a little longer. The costing in shillings and pence, and the assumption that a cook would have cold boiled tongue to hand, both belong to a household that bought a whole tongue and worked through it.