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Boiled Pudding (One quart milk four eggs lard)
One quart milk, four eggs, lard size of turkey's egg. Flour enough to make a batter for a teac up of fruit.
Boil and eat with sauce.--Mrs.R.
One of the shorthand receipts that fills the back pages of contributed cookbooks: the writer assumed her reader had made boiled puddings before and needed only the proportions. Almost everything here has to be reconstructed from period practice.
- Lard the size of a turkey's eggA turkey egg runs roughly half again the size of a hen's egg, so this is about 3 ounces, or 6 tablespoons, of lard. Melt it and let it cool slightly before beating it into the milk and eggs, or it will seize into lumps.
- "Flour enough to make a batter"For a quart of milk and four eggs, expect somewhere between 3 and 4 cups of flour. The target is a thick drop batter that holds the fruit in suspension rather than letting it sink — thicker than pancake batter, looser than a dough.
- A teacup of fruitNineteenth-century teacup measures vary, commonly given as anything from a gill (4 fl oz) to about 6 fl oz, so somewhere between half a cup and three-quarters of a cup. Raisins or currants are the likeliest fruit; toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour first.
- How it was boiled"Boil" means in a scalded, floured pudding cloth tied loosely, or in a greased and floured tin mould or basin covered with cloth, lowered into a pot of boiling water that comes most of the way up the sides. Keep the water at a steady simmer and top it up with boiling water so it never stops.
- TimingA pudding of this size needs about 2 hours, longer if the mould is deep and narrow. It is done when a skewer to the centre comes out clean; a boiled pudding underdone in the middle cannot be rescued by more sauce.
- No leaveningThe recipe relies entirely on the four eggs, so beat them well and fold rather than stir once the flour goes in. The result is dense and close-grained by design, closer to a steamed batter pudding than to a cake.
- The sauce'sauce' here would mean a sweet pudding sauce of the kind the book gives elsewhere: hard sauce of creamed butter and sugar with brandy or nutmeg, or a thin wine or lemon sauce poured hot. The pudding itself carries no sugar at all, so the sauce is doing the sweetening.
- YieldA quart of milk makes a substantial pudding, probably enough for eight servings.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathered receipts from a long list of Virginia housekeepers, most of them credited by initial or surname as "Mrs. R." is here — a form of attribution that let contributors be recognised within their own circle while staying anonymous in print. The boiled pudding itself is straight English inheritance: a batter or suet mixture tied in a floured cloth and boiled in the same pot as the dinner, a technique that predates the reliable domestic oven and survived in American kitchens long after ovens became common because it required nothing but a fire and a kettle. The extreme brevity of the instructions is characteristic of contributed collections of the period; the writer is recording proportions for women who already knew how to scald a pudding cloth and judge a batter by eye.