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Boiled Pudding of Acid Fruit
1 quart of flour (or the weight in stale bread). 2 eggs. 1 pint of milk. 1 teaspoonful of salt. 1/2 1/2 pound of dried fruit.
If apples are used, plump them out by pouring boiling water on them, and let them cool before using them. Season with mace and nutmeg, and eat with sauce.--Mrs. T.
A plain boiled batter pudding of the sort that fed large households cheaply. The original assumes you already know how to tie up a pudding cloth, so the method has to be reconstructed from what the period took for granted.
- The missing instructionNowhere does Mrs. T. say to boil it, or for how long, though the title tells you that is the intent. A batter pudding of this size wants a well-buttered, well-floured cloth or a buttered mould with a lid, lowered into water already at a rolling boil and kept there, topped up with more boiling water so the pot never goes off the boil. Two to three hours is the usual range for a quart-of-flour pudding.
- Measuring flour by volumeA quart of flour is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb by modern scoop-and-level. "Or the weight in stale bread" means about a pound of stale crumb, torn and soaked in the milk until it collapses, which gives a softer, closer pudding than the flour version.
- A pintAmerican measure here: 2 cups of milk. With a pound of flour that yields a thick, spoon-dropping batter rather than a pourable one; with breadcrumbs it will be looser and you may need less.
- No fat and no raising agentThere is neither suet nor butter nor saleratus in the list, which is why this is a plain pudding in the strict sense: dense, moist, and entirely dependent on the sauce. A spoonful of butter and a little baking powder would lighten it, but that is a departure from what is written.
- "Dried fruit"Half a pound of raisins, currants, or dried apples. Home-dried apple was typically leathery and needed reviving, hence the instruction to plump it; modern dried apple is softer but still benefits from the boiling-water soak. Let them cool fully, as the recipe says, or the hot fruit will slacken the batter.
- Mace and nutmegNutmeg was bought whole and grated as needed; mace was usually sold as dried blades and pounded. About half a teaspoon of grated nutmeg and a quarter teaspoon of mace suits this quantity; ground mace loses its perfume fast, so buy small.
- The sauce"Eat with sauce" means a sweet pudding sauce, since there is no sugar at all in the pudding itself. The usual candidates are a hard sauce of creamed butter and sugar with wine or nutmeg, or a thin boiled sauce of butter, sugar and hot water.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a pound of flour with fruit should feed something like eight to ten.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives, is full of these terse signed entries: a list of quantities, one useful hint, and initials. Boiled puddings were the workhorse dessert of a kitchen with an open hearth or a temperamental wood range, since a pot of water is far easier to hold steady than an oven, and a cloth pudding can boil in a covered pot alongside the day's other cooking. The "acid fruit" of the title appears to refer to tart dried apples and similar fruit; a Virginia larder in the 1870s would have had strings of home-dried apple rings put up from the autumn crop, which is exactly the kind of fruit that needs plumping before it will soften in a batter.