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Eve's Pudding
1/2 1/2 pound finely grated bread crumbs. 1/2 1/2 pound finely chopped apples. 4 eggs. 6 ounces sugar. 2 ounces citron, and lemon peel. 1/2 pound finely chopped suet. 1/2 pound currants. A little nutmeg. Butter the mould well, and boil three hours.--Mrs.H.T.S.
A boiled suet pudding of the old English type, set down in the terse shorthand of a book written for cooks who already knew how a pudding cloth behaved. The proportions are sound; almost everything left unsaid is method.
- What the weights come toHalf a pound of fresh breadcrumbs is a generous 4 cups, loosely packed; half a pound of chopped apple is about 2 medium apples, peeled and cored before weighing. Six ounces of sugar is roughly 3/4 cup, and half a pound of currants about 1 1/2 cups.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, chopped very fine or grated after chilling. Butchers will still order it; packaged shredded suet is sold in British groceries. Frozen butter grated on the coarse side of a box grater is the usual stand-in, though the pudding will be softer and less springy.
- Currants are not red currantsThese are dried Zante currants, small black raisins. Plump them briefly in hot water and drain well if they have gone stony.
- Citron and lemon peelBoth are candied peel, sold in tubs around the winter holidays. The original's '2 ounces citron, and lemon peel' most likely means two ounces between them, though it can be read as two ounces of citron with lemon peel added to taste; two ounces chopped fine is about 1/3 cup.
- No flour, so the crumbs do the workThe recipe calls for finely grated crumbs, which implies bread stale enough to grate; crumbs from a plain white loaf suit it better than hard, sandy crumbs from a canister, which absorb the eggs and give a heavier pudding.
- How the boiling actually worksThe buttered mould goes covered, into a pot of water reaching two-thirds up its side, and the water is kept at a bare simmer for the full three hours. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates; if the pot boils dry the pudding scorches, and cold water interrupts the cooking.
- Apples and seasoningA tart firm apple keeps some texture over three hours. A little nutmeg means a quarter teaspoon, grated fresh; the original assumes a whole nutmeg and a rasp.
- Yield and servingServes eight to ten. Turn it out hot and serve with hard sauce, a brandy or lemon sauce, or plain cream. It reheats by steaming and keeps several days refrigerated.
Eve's pudding is generally said to take its name from the apples, and it circulated through English and American cookbooks for well over a century, usually in almost exactly these proportions: equal weights of crumbs, apple, suet and currants, bound with eggs and boiled. Nineteenth-century books printed the recipe as a rhyme rather than a list, the verse including a line about the fruit that tempted Eve, which is traditionally offered as the origin of the name. Its appearance in a household book attributed only to 'Mrs. H.T.S.' is unsurprising: boiled suet puddings were the standard cold-weather sweet in English-descended kitchens, and they required no oven at a time when oven heat was expensive and unreliable. The dish now often called Eve's pudding, a sponge baked over apples, is a later and separate development.