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Boiled Pudding (One pound of flour twelve)
One pound of flour, twelve ounces of butter, eight ounces of sugar, twelve ounces of fruit (either dried cherries or two kinds of preserves). A little mace and wine. Boil like a plum pudding.
A terse nineteenth-century formula that assumes you already know how a plum pudding is put together. The proportions are given by weight, and everything else — eggs, liquid, cloth, time — is left to the cook.
- The weights in cupsOne pound of flour is about 3 1/2 cups; twelve ounces of butter is three sticks; eight ounces of sugar is about a cup, whether granulated or brown packed. Weigh if you can, since the whole balance of the pudding depends on it.
- What is missingNo eggs and no liquid are listed, and this batter will not come together without them. Other boiled puddings of the period generally call for several eggs and enough milk, brandy or water to make a thick dropping batter; treat the original as a ratio rather than a complete method.
- "A little mace and wine"Read this as about a teaspoon of ground mace and a quarter cup of sherry or madeira. Mace is the outer covering of nutmeg, warmer and less sharp; ground nutmeg in a slightly smaller quantity is the nearest substitute.
- Twelve ounces of fruitDried sour cherries are still sold and are the better choice. "Two kinds of preserves" means thick jam stirred through the batter, which sweetens the pudding considerably — cut the sugar to five or six ounces if you go that way.
- "Boil like a plum pudding"The hinge of the recipe. Pack the batter into a well-buttered pudding basin or a floured, scalded cloth, leaving room to swell, tie it down, and lower it into water already at a rolling boil. It must never stop simmering, and the water must be topped up from a boiling kettle so the pudding is not chilled.
- TimingA pudding of this size wants three to four hours at a steady simmer. It is done when a skewer comes out clean and the top springs back; undercooked boiled puddings are heavy and wet at the centre rather than merely soft.
- Steaming insteadA covered basin in a steamer or in an inch of simmering water in a covered pot gives the same result with less fuss than a cloth, and no risk of the cloth loosening.
- Yield and servingRoughly eight to ten servings. Turn it out hot and serve with a hard sauce of butter, sugar and brandy, or a thin wine sauce, which is what the wine in the batter is echoing.
Boiled puddings were the workhorse dessert of English and Anglo-American kitchens for two centuries, and a pudding in a cloth needs no oven and no watching beyond the kettle. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is full of entries like this one: a list of weights and the instruction to proceed as one already knows. Its shorthand assumes a shared body of practice — "boil like a plum pudding" was a complete instruction to its first readers. This recipe uses heavy butter in place of the suet called for in older English plum puddings.