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Steamed Fig Pudding
2 cups stale bread crumbs 2 1/2 cups milk 1 1/3 cups chopped figs 1/2 cup sugar 1 egg 1/4 teaspoon salt The bread crumbs can be made by grinding stale bread through a food chopper, using the coarsest cutter. Left-over end slices of bread are good for this. Mix together all the ingredients except the egg. Separate the egg; mix the yolk with the other ingredients, then beat the white stiff and fold it in last. Put into an oiled pudding dish which can be covered, or into a brown-bread tin, and steam three hours.
Serve hot with cream, whipped cream, cocoanut sauce, or orange sauce. A mild sauce is desirable for a fig pudding. A sauce with a pronounced flavor, like a lemon sauce, so disguises the mild flavor of the pudding that it is impossible to discover by the flavor what kind of pudding is being eaten.
A plain steamed bread-and-milk pudding, closer to a baked custard than to a suet pudding. The three-hour steam is not negotiable if you want the crumbs fully swollen and set.
- Steaming setupSet the covered mould on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides, and keep the water at a bare simmer, topping up with boiling water as it falls. If the pot goes dry the pudding scorches and the mould can crack.
- Cover it properlyThe mould must be sealed or condensing steam will thin the custard. A sheet of parchment then foil, tied under the rim with string, does what the old fitted pudding-dish lid did.
- "Brown-bread tin"A tall cylindrical tin with a lid, sold for steaming Boston brown bread. The batter comes to roughly 6 1/2 cups, so use a mould of about 2 quarts -- a pudding basin, a tall straight-sided tin or similar, covered as above -- leaving an inch of headspace.
- Bread crumbsThese are coarse crumbs from stale bread run through a grinder, not fine dry crumbs from a box. Pulse stale bread in a food processor to something like couscous; commercial dried crumbs absorb differently and give a pasty result.
- FigsDried figs, stemmed and chopped. If they are hard, cover with hot water for ten minutes and drain before chopping, or they will stay leathery even after three hours.
- Cocoanut saucePeriod usage for coconut. The author's point stands: a sweet cream, coconut or orange sauce lets the fig show, while a sharp lemon sauce takes over the dish.
- Doneness and yieldThe pudding is done when a knife inserted at the centre comes out clean and the top feels set rather than sloshing. Serves six; it unmoulds better after ten minutes' rest.
Steamed puddings built on stale bread and milk were the thrifty end of the pudding family, and they persisted in American home-economics cookery into the twentieth century as a way of using bread ends. Dried figs made such a pudding feel like a treat without butter, suet or much sugar; imported Smyrna figs, and later Californian ones, were widely available by the early 1900s. The recipe's insistence on a mild sauce reads as a piece of teaching typical of the genre: the cook is being trained to taste the pudding itself rather than smother it.