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Wiltshire Pudding
Whisk three eggs in a bowl, and mix with them a pint of milk, a pinch of salt, and as much flour as will make a thick batter. Beat the mixture for some minutes, then stir in gently half a pint of picked red currants and a quarter of a pint of ripe raspberries. If more convenient, the raspberries may be omitted. Tie the pudding in a cloth, and plunge it into fast-boiling water; keep it boiling quickly till done enough. Turn it out carefully upon a dish, and cut it into slices three-quarters of an inch thick. Keep these in their original position. Put a little butter and brown sugar between the slices, and serve the pudding hot with sauce in a tureen. Time to boil the pudding, two hours. Probable cost, 10d. to 1s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A boiled batter pudding studded with summer fruit — closer to a dense baked-batter texture than to a sponge. The technique, not the ingredient list, is where it succeeds or fails.
- The cloth is the whole methodScald a large square of cotton or linen in boiling water, wring it out, and dust the inside thickly with flour before the batter goes in. The flour forms a skin that keeps water out; a dry cloth will let the pudding waterlog. Tie loosely enough to allow a little swelling, but not so loose that water seeps in at the gather.
- Keep it at a hard boilThe instruction to boil quickly is not incidental. A batter pudding that sits in water below a rolling boil absorbs it and turns to paste. Have a kettle going and top the pan up with boiling — never cold — water across the two hours.
- Imperial measuresA pint here is the imperial 20 fl oz, so roughly 2½ US cups of milk; the half-pint of currants is about 1¼ cups and the quarter-pint of raspberries a generous half-cup. Eggs of the period were ungraded and likely to have averaged smaller than today's large eggs.
- How much flour"As much as will make a thick batter" is genuinely open. For 20 fl oz of milk and three eggs, expect somewhere near 10–12 oz of plain flour — the batter should drop heavily from the spoon rather than pour, or the fruit will sink to one end.
- Folding in the fruitRed currants and raspberries both bleed the moment they break. Stir them in at the last second, with a light hand, and accept some pink streaking. Currants strung on the stalk should be picked off with a fork.
- Turning outLet the pudding stand in the cloth a minute or two after lifting it from the water so the surface firms, then untie and invert onto a warm dish. Cutting into ¾-inch slices and reassembling them with butter and brown sugar between is the point of the dish — the heat melts the layers into a sauce inside the pudding.
- The sauce in a tureenNo sauce is specified. A thin sweet white sauce, a custard, or simply melted butter with sugar and a little of the fruit juice all suit; serve it separately and hot, as directed.
- Yield and costFive or six servings. The "10d. to 1s." is late-Victorian retail pricing and belongs to the book's habit of costing every dish for the household mistress; it carries no modern equivalent worth quoting.
Boiled puddings tied in a cloth were the backbone of English domestic cookery from the seventeenth century onward, and survived into the Victorian kitchen because they needed only a pot of water and a hook over the fire — no oven. Batter versions like this one sit between the plain boiled batter pudding and the fruit-filled summer puddings of high season; red currants and raspberries ripen at much the same time in an English summer, which may be part of why they are so often paired in period recipe books. County names attached to puddings — Wiltshire, Kentish, Sussex — were frequently a publisher's or compiler's label rather than evidence of a documented local tradition, and Cassell's uses them freely. Slicing the cooked pudding and buttering it between the slices, keeping them in position, gets sugar and fat into a mixture that contains neither.