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Delicate Pudding
Delicate pudding may have as a basis the strained juice of any variety of fruit on hand.
Take 1 cupful of such juice, add 1 cupful of water, a grain of salt and bring quickly to the boiling point. Sweeten to taste, then stir in 2 tablespoonfuls of corn-starch wet with cold water and stir until smoothly thickened and clear. Draw to one side and boil gently for ten minutes, then cut in lightly the stiffly whipped whites of 3 eggs. Cut and mix over the fire for two minutes longer, then pour into a wetted mold with alternate layers of the same fruit, cut or whole, according to size.
Serve very cold with a custard made with 1 pint of milk, the egg yolks, 2 tablespoonfuls of sugar and a little flavoring which will accord with the fruit used.
A Good All-round Pudding Sift together 1 pint of whole wheat flour, ½ teaspoonful each of salt and baking-soda and 1 teaspoonful of mixed ground spices. Add ½ cupful each of finely chopped suet, molasses and sour milk, and from 1/2 to 1 cupful of mixed fruit of any kind, fresh berries or chopped apples, etc., in the season, currants, citron or other dried or candied fruits in winter; the spice used should always accord with the fruit. Turn into buttered molds-pound baking-powder cans or cups-and steam from one to two hours according to the sized molds used. Serve with a hard or a soft sauce. This simple recipe is capable of many variations.
Two puddings on one page: a cornstarch fruit mold stretched with beaten whites, and a steamed suet pudding built on whatever fruit the season offers. Both are frugal in the way this book is frugal — the three yolks left over from the first become the sauce.
- The hinge: acid and cornstarchFruit juice is acidic, and prolonged boiling breaks down cornstarch in acid, thinning a set that had already thickened. Cook it just until smooth and clear and hold at a bare simmer; the ten-minute gentle boil the recipe calls for is the outer limit, and with a sharp juice such as currant or plum the pudding may set only softly.
- Folding in the whites"Cut in lightly" means fold, not stir — the whites are there to lighten a starch pudding into something closer to a fruit snow. Two minutes over the fire is barely enough to set them; keep the pan on low heat rather than off it entirely, and if you are serving anyone vulnerable to raw egg, use pasteurized whites.
- A grain of saltAn informal way of saying a very small pinch, well under 1/8 teaspoon, rather than a defined measure. It is there mainly to sharpen the fruit.
- The custard sauceOne pint of milk, three yolks and two tablespoons sugar makes a thin pouring custard. Cook it in a double boiler or over low heat to about 175F, until it coats the back of a spoon, then strain and chill. It will not thicken further and should not be allowed to approach a boil.
- Wetted moldRinsing the mold in cold water and leaving it wet is the period trick for turning out a starch pudding cleanly; it works, and it beats oiling, which leaves a film. Chill at least four hours. The first pudding serves four to six.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk in a book of this period meant naturally clabbered raw milk. Pasteurized milk tends to spoil rather than clabber cleanly, so use buttermilk, or a half cup of milk with a teaspoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes. The soda needs that acid to lift the pudding.
- SuetBeef suet from the kidney area, asked for at a butcher counter or bought shredded and floured. Freeze it briefly and grate it. Frozen shredded suet works directly; butter can stand in but gives a denser, shorter crumb.
- Baking-powder cansDo not use modern food cans as molds — the linings are not made for prolonged wet heat and the seams are not designed to be reheated. Use pudding basins, straight-sided ramekins or heatproof cups, filled two-thirds, covered with pleated foil or a floured cloth and tied.
- SteamingSet the molds on a rack in a covered pot with water reaching halfway up, at a steady low boil, and top up with boiling water as it goes. One hour for cup-sized molds, closer to two for a pint basin; the pudding is done when a skewer comes out clean and it has pulled slightly from the sides.
- Hard or soft sauceHard sauce is creamed butter and powdered sugar with brandy or vanilla, served cold on the hot pudding. Soft sauce is the thin custard above, or a sugar-and-butter sauce loosened with hot water. One pint basin serves four to six.
Cornstarch puddings of this kind became common household fare after commercial corn starch was manufactured on a large scale in the mid-nineteenth century, and the fruit-juice version — sometimes called a fruit blancmange or a fruit snow — was, one imagines, welcome in economy cookery because it turned windfall or leftover juice, a little starch and a few eggs into a dessert for a family. Its companion here belongs to an older tradition entirely: the steamed suet pudding, boiled in a cloth or basin over the same fire that was doing other work, which allowed a substantial sweet course without an oven. That the book gives no fixed fruit for either dish is the point. A low-cost cookery book of this period assumes that the cook has whatever the season and the pantry supplied, and its recipes are written as frameworks rather than formulas — the closing line, that the pudding "is capable of many variations," is an instruction as much as an observation.