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White Puddings, Sweet
Shred finely half a pound of fresh pork kidney fat, put it into a bowl, and mix with it a pinch of salt, four ounces of flour, four ounces of powdered white sugar, four ounces of currants, cleaned and picked, two ounces of ground rice, a table-spoonful of candied lemon-peel, and the same quantity of candied orange-peel, both chopped small, an ounce of sweet and four bitter almonds blanched and chopped, and a little grated nutmeg. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly, moisten with a quarter of a pint of new milk, and bind the mixture together with two well-whisked eggs. Beat the pudding with a wooden spoon for twenty minutes, put it into well-cleaned skins, and be careful to leave room for the mixture to swell. Tie the ends securely, put the puddings into boiling water, and boil gently until done enough. Before serving them remove the skins. If liked, the puddings may be put aside and kept for a while before being used. They must then be hung separately in a cool situation, and boiled for a short time, to heat them, before serving. Time to boil the puddings, about two hours and a half; when boiled the second time, a quarter of an hour will be sufficient. Probable cost, 1s. 3d.
This is a boiled sweet sausage of the older English kind, and two things in it put it outside what a modern kitchen can safely reproduce. Both are worth understanding rather than working around.
- Bitter almonds are the blockerBitter almonds are the weak point -- The four bitter almonds are there for their strong almond scent, which comes from amygdalin breaking down to benzaldehyde — and to hydrogen cyanide alongside it. Raw bitter almonds are not sold as food in the United States, and amygdalin levels in food are regulated in the EU. Four nuts dispersed through a whole batch, then boiled for hours, is a small exposure, but a recipe that doses a cyanogenic nut by the piece rather than by weight is not one to reproduce; use a proper almond flavouring instead.
- The keeping instruction"Put aside and kept for a while... hung separately in a cool situation" describes a larder in an unheated house, applied to a cooked but uncured pudding of pork kidney fat, milk and egg — a pinch of salt is all the seasoning, with no cure, no nitrate and no measured temperature. Nothing in the mixture holds back Clostridium or staphylococcal growth at modern room temperature, and the quarter-hour reheat the book allows is a warming rather than a reliable kill step.
- The skins"Well-cleaned skins" assumes casings prepared elsewhere and ready to fill, with no instruction for their handling. Casings today come salted or in brine and need soaking and rinsing; the book's silence on any of this is a sign of how much of the process happened outside the kitchen.
- On the rest of itNothing else here is dangerous — pork kidney fat is simply hard suet from around the kidneys, ground rice is rice flour, and "powdered white sugar" of the period means finely milled sugar rather than modern powdered sugar with its cornstarch. If you want a sweet boiled pudding of this type, use a current recipe with proper almond flavouring and cooking temperatures.
Sweet white puddings belong to a long English and Scottish tradition of boiled puddings made in skins, the same family that produced black pudding but without the blood — hence "white". Medieval and early modern versions were often sweet, spiced with nutmeg and studded with dried fruit and almonds, and the line running from them through the hackin and the plum pudding is generally traced by food historians as one continuous thread of suet-and-fruit cookery. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the late nineteenth century, the sweet pudding had largely migrated out of the casing and into the cloth or basin, and the skinned version survives here mainly as a record of older practice: note that the recipe tells you to remove the skins before serving, so the casing had become nothing but a mould. The bitter almonds, likewise, are a relic — cooks reached for a few of the bitter nuts to get that intensity, a survival that persisted alongside the commercial essences already on the market, and a habit Victorian books repeated without comment before it gradually fell away.