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Vermicelli Pudding, Boiled
Put four ounces of fresh vermicelli into a saucepan with a pint and a quarter of milk. Bring it gently to the boil, and simmer it, stirring all the time, till it is tender, and the milk thick. It will take from ten to fifteen minutes. Pour it into a bowl, let it cool, sweeten it, and flavour with lemon and nutmeg. Add a pinch of salt, and stir in gradually three well-beaten eggs. Butter thickly the inside of a mould. Stick raisins here and there upon it, and pour in the vermicelli and milk very gently, so as not to disturb the fruit. Let the mould be quite full. Place a round of buttered paper on the top, tie the pudding firmly in a floured cloth, plunge it into a saucepan of fast-boiling water, and keep it boiling quickly till done enough. Move it occasionally for the first quarter of an hour to prevent any of the ingredients from settling to the bottom. As the water boils away add more, boiling. Let the pudding stand four minutes after it is taken out of the water, and place it on a hot dish. Pour sweet sauce round it, and serve. If more convenient, the pudding may be steamed instead of being boiled. Time, one hour and a quarter to boil or steam the pudding. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian boiled milk pudding, closer to a set custard than anything pasta-shaped. The technique is straightforward; most of the guesswork is in the quantities the original leaves unstated.
- The right vermicelliThis means fine wheat-flour vermicelli, the thin Italian pasta, usually sold in coiled nests and broken up before use. Rice vermicelli or bean thread will not thicken the milk the same way and should not be substituted.
- MeasuresFour ounces is about 115 g of dry vermicelli; a pint and a quarter is 25 imperial fluid ounces, roughly 700 ml. The book's pint is the imperial 20 oz pint, not the American 16 oz.
- Sweetening is left to youNo sugar quantity is given. Two to three ounces (55-85 g) of caster sugar suits a pint and a quarter of milk; add it off the heat as directed, so it dissolves without catching.
- Flavour with lemon and nutmegGrated rind of one lemon, not juice, which would curdle the milk. Nutmeg should be freshly grated and used lightly, a quarter teaspoon at most.
- Cool before the eggsThe instruction to let the mixture cool before stirring in the beaten eggs is the hinge of the recipe. Added to hot vermicelli the eggs scramble, and the pudding turns granular instead of setting smooth.
- Mould and clothA two-pint (about 1.1 litre) pudding basin, buttered thickly so the raisins stick to the sides; the milk alone is a pint and a quarter before the eggs and sugar go in, and the recipe wants the mould quite full. If you have no pudding cloth, buttered greaseproof paper and foil pleated across the top, tied under the rim, does the same job.
- Boiling or steamingAn hour and a quarter either way. The recipe plunges the cloth-tied mould into fast-boiling water, immersed; if instead you cover a basin with paper and foil, keep the water no more than two-thirds up its side. Top-ups must be boiling water so the pudding never stops cooking. Test with a skewer: it should come out clean.
- Sweet sauceSweet sauces of the period were commonly a thin sweetened white sauce or a wine sauce, poured round rather than over. A custard sauce works as well and is closer to modern taste.
- YieldFour to five, as stated. The ten pence of "probable cost" is late-Victorian money and gives a sense of how cheap a family pudding this was.
Vermicelli reached British kitchens well before Italian food did, generally traced to the eighteenth century, when it appears as a dried store-cupboard good sold by grocers and used chiefly in soups and, as here, in milk puddings; its precise arrival is not datable. By the time Cassell's dictionary appeared it sat comfortably alongside rice, sago, tapioca and semolina in the long list of farinaceous puddings that fed Victorian households cheaply and filled out a dinner after a small joint. The method itself is older than the ingredient: a buttered mould studded with raisins, filled to the brim, tied in a floured cloth and boiled for over an hour is the standard English pudding technique of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, dating from a time when the copper of boiling water was more reliably available than a controllable oven. The recipe's concession that the pudding "may be steamed instead" marks a shift already underway, though what drove it is a matter of interpretation.