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Red Currant Pudding
Stew two-thirds currants and one-third raspberries with a little sugar till soft; pour off juice and place fruit in a pudding-dish lined with stale sponge cake. Let stand till cold with cake on top and on this a weight. Boil down the juice poured off and when ready to serve pour it over the pudding.
This is a summer pudding built on sponge cake rather than the more usual white bread, and it depends almost entirely on pressing and chilling. The recipe gives no quantities, so read it as a method and scale to your dish.
- QuantitiesThe recipe gives none. Working backwards from the mould, something in the region of 2 lb (900 g) of fruit should fill a 1-quart basin, which at the recipe's two-to-one ratio is roughly 1 lb 5 oz currants to 11 oz raspberries. Sugar to taste; currants are sharp, so start at around 5-6 oz and adjust.
- "Stew till soft"Three to five minutes over low heat is enough. The currants only need to burst and release juice; longer and the raspberries collapse to seeds and fibre.
- Stale sponge cakeDay-old plain sponge, cut in slices about ½ inch thick. A rich, iced, or oil-based cake is likelier to go greasy than absorbent, and very fresh cake tends to paste under the weight.
- Lining the dishLine base and sides with the cake, fitting the pieces tightly so no gap lets juice escape, then fill with the drained fruit and cap with more cake. Line the basin with cling film first if you intend to turn the pudding out.
- The weightA plate that sits just inside the rim, with 2–3 lb on top — a large tin, a bag of sugar. This is the hinge of the recipe: the pressure drives juice through the cake and binds the whole thing so it holds its shape.
- Chilling time"Let stand till cold" understates it. Refrigerate at least 8 hours, preferably overnight, still weighted.
- The reserved juiceReduce it by about half over a moderate heat until it coats a spoon lightly. The recipe has it poured over at serving; reduced too far it may set to a jelly on the cold pudding rather than soaking in.
- YieldA 1-quart pudding serves six. Cream, unsweetened or barely sweetened, is the usual accompaniment.
Puddings of this kind — raw or barely cooked soft fruit pressed into a lining of bread or cake and weighted until the juice sets the whole — were an English summer fixture long before the name "summer pudding" became standard in the twentieth century; earlier books often call them hydropathic pudding, a name generally traced, though not firmly documented, to the nineteenth-century water-cure establishments where a flourless, butterless dessert suited the regimen. Red currants are the structural choice here rather than the flavouring one: they are high in pectin and acid, which is why the reduced juice thickens so readily, while the raspberries supply the perfume the currants lack. Currant bushes were a familiar fixture of English kitchen gardens, and the fruit's short, glut-like season explains the many recipes for using it up. Substituting sponge cake for bread, as here, makes a sweeter, softer pudding and quietly uses up cake that has gone dry.