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Fig Pudding
½ lb. figs 2 pints (4 cups) milk 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) sugar 3 heaping tablespoonfuls (3 3 eggs ozs.) cornstarch ½ teaspoonful lemon extract Wash the figs, cut them into small pieces, then put them into a buttered casserole. Put the cornstarch into a saucepan and moisten it with half a cupful of the milk. Bring the rest of the milk to the boiling point, pour it over the cornstarch, and stir till it boils for ten minutes. Add the sugar, lemon extract, and the eggs well beaten.
Pour over the figs and bake in a moderate oven for half an hour. Serve with milk or cream.
A cornstarch custard poured over dried figs and set in the oven — closer to a baked blancmange than to a suet pudding. The technique is straightforward, but the starch handling and the egg timing both need attention.
- CasseroleHere the casserole is the baking dish itself, not the finished stew. A 2-quart baking dish is ample; the mixture is thin when it goes in.
- Moderate ovenConventionally reckoned at about 350F, though the recipe gives no temperature. Half an hour at that heat sets the custard without letting the egg curdle at the edges.
- Boil the starch, but watch the ten minutesCornstarch needs to come to a full boil to lose its raw taste and reach full thickening power, but ten minutes of hard boiling with constant stirring will thin it back down and scorch the milk. Two to three minutes at a bare boil, stirring, is enough; keep the heat low and the spoon moving.
- Adding the eggsThe beaten eggs go into a pan of near-boiling starch mixture, which will scramble them if dumped in. Let the thickened milk cool for a few minutes, then temper the eggs with a ladleful before stirring them back in.
- FigsAlmost certainly dried rather than fresh. Trim the hard stem ends, and if they are very dry, soak them in hot water for ten minutes and drain before cutting, or they will stay leathery in a half-hour bake.
- Lemon extractA teaspoon and a half of extract is assertive by modern taste. The zest of one lemon, or a teaspoon of extract, gives a cleaner flavour.
- SugarTwo ounces for four cups of milk is barely sweet, on the assumption that the figs carry the sweetness. Taste the custard before it goes over the fruit and adjust.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. It is served warm with milk or cream poured over, but it also sets firm enough to slice once thoroughly chilled.
Casserole cookery was being marketed hard to English and American households in the early twentieth century, when fireproof earthenware and the new heatproof glass made one-dish oven cooking practical for kitchens without a battery of copper. Books like this one appear to exist to show what the new vessel could do, and puddings were an easy sell: the same dish thickens on the hob and bakes in the oven. The pudding itself belongs to the large family of cornstarch custards that spread through nineteenth-century cookery once refined corn starch became a cheap grocery staple, a way of setting milk without a mould or a water bath. Dried figs were an ordinary winter store cupboard fruit rather than a luxury, imported in pressed blocks from Turkey and Greece, and they turn up throughout Victorian and Edwardian pudding chapters alongside dates, prunes and raisins.