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Four Eggs (Chop the suet figs almonds)
Chop the suet, figs, almonds, cherries, and angelica very fine; mix all well, and add the dry ingredients; mix again, and stir in the eggs, cream, and brandy. Boil for four hours or steam for five.
This is the method half of a boiled suet pudding; the page as printed gives only the working instructions, with the ingredient list carried in the title line and lost in transcription. What survives still tells you a good deal about how these puddings were built and cooked.
- The list is incompleteThe text names suet, figs, almonds, cherries, angelica, unspecified "dry ingredients" (in a pudding of this type, breadcrumbs or flour and sugar, sometimes both), four eggs, cream and brandy, but gives no quantities for any of them. Treat it as a template rather than a recipe you can weigh out, and take amounts from a full fig-pudding recipe.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, shredded or chopped very fine so it melts through the batter and leaves the crumb open. Packaged shredded suet works directly; a butcher's block suet is easier to chop if it is chilled hard first. Vegetable suet behaves similarly.
- AngelicaCandied stems of Angelica archangelica, once a standard confectioner's green for cakes and puddings and now sold mainly by baking suppliers. Candied citrus peel is the usual stand-in; it is sweeter and less resinous.
- CherriesAlmost certainly candied or glace rather than fresh, given the angelica and the dried fruit alongside them; fresh fruit would water the mixture and unbalance a pudding built on dried fruit and suet.
- Chop fine, and mean itThe hinge of the recipe. Suet, figs and candied pieces all have to be reduced to something near the size of the crumbs so the pudding sets evenly; coarse lumps of fat leave holes and coarse figs sink.
- Boiled or steamedBoiling means the pudding is tied in a floured cloth or covered basin and sat in fast-simmering water; steaming means a covered basin over water. Steaming is given the longer time because the heat is gentler. Either way the water must be topped up with boiling water and must never be allowed to run dry.
- Four to five hoursNot an exaggeration. A dense suet-and-fruit mixture takes that long for the centre to reach setting temperature and for the suet to render through. Cover the basin with pleated paper and foil, or the cloth, or condensation will soak the top.
- Yield and servingWith no quantities given, the basin size and number of servings cannot be worked out from the page. It is meant hot, with brandy sauce, custard or plain cream, and reheats by steaming; wrapped and cold it keeps for several days.
Boiled and steamed suet puddings were a mainstay of the British sweet course from the eighteenth century onward, and this one belongs to the richer end of the family: figs rather than raisins, almonds, cream and brandy, candied cherries and angelica. The pudding cloth and the pudding basin made a substantial dessert possible in a kitchen with one fire and no oven to spare. Fig puddings are often associated with Christmas in the nineteenth century, though they were served well beyond it. A recipe headed simply by its egg count reads as a shorthand entry, the sort of thing written for someone who already knew what a fig pudding contained and needed only the proportions and the timing.