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Virginia Pudding
Butter a plain quart pudding-mould rather thickly, then stick dried cherries, fine raisins, or strips of candied peel in regular rows on the inside, place a slice of soaked bread-crumb over the fruit, and three-parts fill the inside with alternate layers of thin bread and butter and currants and grated nutmeg. Pour in as much custard as the bread will absorb, let the pudding soak for an hour, and steam it over boiling water, or bake in a moderate oven. Turn it out before serving, and send sweet sauce to table in a tureen. Time to steam, one hour and a half. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
This is a lined and steamed bread-and-butter pudding, close kin to cabinet pudding. The recipe assumes you already know how to make a boiled custard, so the one real gap is how much custard to have ready.
- The mouldA plain quart pudding-mould holds about 1.1 litres (an imperial quart, 40 fl oz) — a charlotte mould, pudding basin or straight-sided tin of that capacity all work. Butter it heavily and cold, so the fruit pattern stays put when you build the layers against it.
- How much custardThe original leaves this to judgement. For a quart mould three-parts filled with bread, have about 1 1/2 cups (350 ml) of custard ready: roughly 1 1/4 cups milk to 2 eggs plus a yolk and 2 tablespoons sugar. Pour in only what the bread drinks; excess will weep out of the seams.
- "Soaked bread-crumb"This means the crumb of the loaf — a crustless slice — dipped in milk or custard until limp, laid over the fruit to hold the pattern in place. It is not dry breadcrumbs.
- The hour's soakNot optional. Dry bread that goes into the steamer un-soaked stays as distinct layers and the custard sets around it rather than through it. An hour at room temperature, or longer in the refrigerator, gives one continuous set.
- SteamingCover the mould tightly with buttered parchment and foil, tied or crimped, and set it on a trivet in a pan of water reaching halfway up. Keep the water at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil, and top it up with boiling water. An hour and a half is right for a full quart mould.
- Baking insteadA moderate oven is roughly 325-350F (165-175C). Stand the mould in a roasting tin of hot water and bake 50-60 minutes. In either method the pudding is done when the centre reaches about 175F (80C) and a skewer comes out clean; pushed further, the custard curdles and turns watery.
- Turning outRest it 8-10 minutes off the heat before inverting, or the fruit-studded outside tears away with the mould. Run a thin knife round the rim first.
- Sweet sauceA thin pouring custard, or a sugar-and-butter sauce loosened with brandy or sherry, in a warmed jug. Serves five or six.
- Dried cherriesVictorian "dried cherries" may well have meant candied or glacé fruit rather than the modern kind; unsweetened dried sour cherries are more acidic and much drier, so soak them in warm water or spirits for ten minutes before pressing them into the butter.
Cassell's fills its pudding chapter with lined and turned-out moulds of this type, of a kind associated with the cabinet puddings of nineteenth-century English and French kitchens — a buttered mould patterned with fruit or peel, packed with bread, cake or biscuit, and set with custard, then unmoulded so the pattern shows. Names like "Virginia" were attached loosely in Victorian dictionaries of cookery, often to distinguish one variation from a dozen near-identical neighbours rather than to record any real origin, and no American connection should be read into it without evidence. What the recipe does document plainly is the economy of the period kitchen: stale bread, a little butter, currants, nutmeg and a small custard, priced at a shilling for five or six people, made presentable by the mould rather than by expensive ingredients.