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Marrow Pudding
Grate a large loaf of bread and pour on the crumbs a pint of rich milk, boiling hot. When cold, add four eggs, a pound of beef marrow, sliced thin, a gill of brandy with sugar and nutmeg to your taste. Mix all well together and bake it. When done stick slices of citron on the top. You may make a boiled pudding of this, if you prefer.--Mrs. E.
A rich bread-and-suet-style pudding of the older English school, here made with beef marrow rather than suet. Nothing in it is unsafe; the difficulties are all in the vague quantities and the marrow itself.
- The marrowA pound of beef marrow means the soft fat scooped from split leg or shank bones — a butcher will saw them for you, and you need roughly 4 to 5 lb of bones to yield a pound. Chill the marrow hard before slicing, or it smears; some cooks soak the bones in cold salted water overnight to draw out blood.
- How much breadA "large loaf" is not a fixed measure, and loaf sizes of the period varied a good deal; take it as somewhere upward of 1 1/2 lb. Grated stale crumbs from a loaf that size come to roughly 6 cups loosely packed; with a pint of milk the mixture should be thick and soft, not pourable, so hold back some crumbs and judge by texture.
- A gill of brandyHalf a cup. That is a considerable amount in a pudding this size and it carries most of the flavour alongside the nutmeg, so use something you would drink.
- Sugar to tasteNo quantity is given; the recipe leaves sweetening to the cook. For a pudding of this size, 3/4 to 1 cup is in keeping with period richness; half that reads as a modern dessert.
- OvenBake at 325 to 350F. It is essentially a custard held together with bread, so it wants steady moderate heat — a buttered dish set in a pan of hot water is the safest course, roughly an hour to an hour and a quarter, until the centre is just set.
- The boiled versionFor the alternative, the batter goes into a well-buttered and floured pudding basin or a scalded, floured cloth, covered, and sits in simmering water for about two hours with the water topped up. It comes out denser than the baked one.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in the baking aisle around the winter holidays. Press the slices on while the pudding is still hot so they adhere; candied orange or lemon peel stands in acceptably.
- YieldEnough for eight to ten. It is very rich and suits small portions; a sweetened hard sauce or a wine sauce is a fitting accompaniment.
Marrow puddings belong to a long English line running back through the seventeenth century, when marrow was a prized cooking fat and appeared in tarts, pies and sweet puddings as readily as in savoury dishes. Bread, milk, eggs, spirits, dried or candied fruit and a rich fat is the standard skeleton of that whole family; suet eventually crowded marrow out, and the marrow version survives mainly in older household books like this one. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives — the "Mrs. E." signature here is typical of the book's method — and English pudding forms persist in it alongside distinctly Southern cookery.