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West Country Pudding
Take a quarter of a pound of good baking apples, weighed after they are pared and cored. Mince them finely, and mix with them a quarter of a pound of currants picked and dried, a quarter of a pound of finely-grated bread-crumbs, three table-spoonfuls of moist sugar, and two well-beaten eggs. Press the mixture into a buttered mould which it will quite fill, plunge it into boiling water, and keep it boiling quickly till done enough. Send sweet sauce to table with it. If liked, cold boiled rice which has been drained from the milk in which it was cooked may be used instead of bread-crumbs. Time to boil the pudding, one hour and a half. Probable cost, 5d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A boiled bread-crumb pudding with no flour, suet or butter in the mixture, so the eggs and crumbs do all the binding. The hinge is the mould: it must be filled to the top, sealed, and kept in water that never stops moving, or the pudding sets loose and floods when turned out.
- Sealing the mouldThe original says only to butter the mould and fill it flush; it does not say how it was covered, though a lidded pudding mould or a basin tied with a cloth would have been usual. Butter the basin, fill it flush, then cover with buttered parchment and foil pleated across the middle and tied under the rim; otherwise water gets in and the crumbs turn to porridge.
- "Boiling quickly" and the water lineStand the basin on a trivet or folded cloth in a deep pan and keep the water two-thirds up the side, topping up with boiling water from the kettle. A steady rolling boil is what is meant; a hard rattling boil only tips the basin about. A covered steamer will also work, though it is gentler and may need longer than the 90 minutes given.
- Moist sugarVictorian "moist sugar" is unrefined soft sugar, closest to today's light brown soft sugar. Three tablespoons is roughly 40 g, which makes this a restrained pudding by modern standards.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. "Picked and dried" means pulling off stalks and grit, then washing and drying them thoroughly, which pre-cleaned packet fruit no longer needs.
- Bread-crumbsFine crumbs from stale, close-textured white bread, about 115 g. Fresh commercial sliced bread gives a pastier crumb; dry it in a low oven first if it is soft.
- ApplesA quarter pound pared and cored is about 115 g, so a small cooking apple or part of a large Bramley. Mince finely rather than grating, so the pieces hold some shape against the crumbs.
- The rice variantCold rice boiled in milk and drained replaces the crumbs entirely; the recipe gives no quantity for it. It sets softer, so let it stand a little before turning out.
- Turning out and sauceLift the basin out, let it stand five minutes, then invert onto a warm plate. "Sweet sauce" is left undefined here; a pouring custard, or a sweetened white sauce flavoured with lemon, brandy or sherry, would suit.
- YieldFour to five as written, which is a modest basin of about a pint. The 5d costing is a snapshot of late-Victorian grocery prices and carries no meaning now.
Boiled puddings in a cloth or mould were a mainstay of English domestic cookery for generations, and by the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled in the 1870s the genre had splintered into dozens of regional and household names, many of them attached to a county on no firmer grounds than tradition. The West Country association here is unexplained by the recipe itself: Devon, Somerset and Dorset were cider-apple country and cooking apples were a cheap seasonal sweetener. What marks the recipe out is the absence of suet and flour, the two ingredients that make a pudding heavy and cheap; instead it leans on bread-crumbs, eggs and imported dried currants, which had become ordinary grocery by the mid-nineteenth century. Cassell's habit of printing a probable cost and the number of persons served suggests the book was written for a mistress budgeting for a household rather than for a professional kitchen.