Home › Boiled Puddings › Canary Pudding
Canary Pudding
Weight of 3 eggs in sugar Weight of 2 eggs in Five Roses flour Weight of 1 egg in butter 1 small lemon.
Melt the butter, stir in the sugar and add the juice of lemon and grated rind (being careful not to grate any of the inner white rind). Gradually add the flour and lastly the eggs beaten lightly (whites and yolks) separate. Pour in well-greased mould. Cover with lid and plunge into a pot of boiling water. Boil for 2 hours.
Serve with lemon sauce or fruit sauce.
A steamed lemon sponge measured by the old balance-scale method: eggs in one pan, sugar or flour or butter in the other. The proportions are sound; the boiling time is the part that needs rethinking.
- What the egg weights come toA modern large egg in shell runs about 2 oz (57 g), so figure roughly 6 oz (170 g) sugar, 4 oz (115 g) flour and 2 oz (57 g) butter. Weigh your own eggs if you want to be faithful to the method — that is the whole point of it.
- How many eggs go inThe recipe never says. Three is the working assumption, since three is the largest number weighed and the batter needs that much liquid to come together.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour, somewhat stronger than most American all-purpose. Plain all-purpose works; do not substitute self-rising, as there is no other leavening here and the pudding relies entirely on beaten whites.
- Fold, do not stirThe whites are beaten separately for lift. Fold them in last with a light hand — this batter has no baking powder behind it, and deflated whites give a dense, wet pudding.
- The mouldA 1-quart pudding basin or covered mould, buttered heavily and filled no more than two-thirds. If your basin has no lid, cover with buttered parchment and foil, pleated across the middle to allow for rise, and tie under the rim.
- Boiling water levelAs written this is a boiled pudding: a lidded mould dropped into a pot of boiling water. If you prefer to steam it, stand the mould in water coming halfway up and hold it at a bare simmer, topping up with boiling water from a kettle as the level drops; with a lid that does not seal tightly, keeping the water below the rim avoids water getting in.
- Two hours is longA sponge of this size will probably be done well before two hours; start testing at around an hour and a quarter, when a skewer to the centre comes out clean and the top springs back.
- Lemon rindThe warning about the white pith still holds. Take only the yellow zest, and rub it into the sugar rather than adding it loose if you want the oil distributed.
- Yield and sauceServes four to six. Lemon sauce of the period is sugar, water, cornstarch, lemon juice and zest cooked to a light gloss, finished with butter; any tart fruit purée does the same job.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour to Canadian households, and its pudding chapter is essentially English domestic cookery transplanted. Canary pudding is a standard of that tradition — a small steamed sponge, lemon-scented, turned out and sauced — and the name is generally traced to its colour rather than to the bird's home islands, though no early source settles the question. The method of weighing ingredients against eggs is older than the recipe itself: it predates reliable standardised cup measures and survives in the pound cake and the French quatre-quarts, and it self-corrects, since larger eggs demand proportionally more of everything. Boiled and steamed puddings held on in Canadian kitchens well into the twentieth century because they need only a pot and a stovetop, useful where ovens were wood-fired and their heat hard to hold steady.