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Carrot Pudding No. 1
12 ounces of carrots 8 ounces bread crumbs grated 2 1/2 ounces butter 3 ounces currants A little grated nutmeg 3 ounces sultanas 1 1/2 ounces sugar Cook the carrots thoroughly; then grate or pass through a sieve. Chop up the butter, pass the bread crumbs through a sieve; pick over currants and sultanas, mix all together with the sugar and nutmeg. Add a little milk if not moist enough. Put into a well greased mold, and steam four hours.
A wartime-style steamed pudding that leans on carrots for sweetness and moisture rather than on eggs or suet. The method is straightforward; the details below are where the original assumes knowledge a modern cook may not have.
- Weights, not cupsThe recipe is entirely by weight and works best kept that way: 12 oz carrots (about 340 g), 8 oz breadcrumbs (225 g, which is a generous 4 cups of soft fresh crumbs), 2 1/2 oz butter (70 g), 3 oz each currants and sultanas (85 g each), 1 1/2 oz sugar (40 g). Volume conversions for breadcrumbs are unreliable because packing varies enormously.
- Breadcrumbs mean fresh soft crumbsIn a book of this period, "bread crumbs grated" are made by rubbing stale but not dried-out bread on a grater. Dry commercial crumbs will drink far more liquid and give a dense, sandy pudding.
- Chop the butter in coldThere is no creaming step. Rubbing or chopping cold butter through the crumbs, as for a crumble, distributes the fat so the pudding is not greasy at the base. Softened butter smeared through will do the same job less evenly.
- The hinge: moisture"Add a little milk if not moist enough" is the whole success of the dish. With no eggs binding it, the mixture should be a soft dropping consistency that falls slowly from the spoon; too dry and it steams into a crumbly mass that will not turn out. Add milk a tablespoon at a time.
- Steaming setupGrease a 2 pint (about 1.1 litre) pudding basin or mould, cover it with pleated parchment and foil tied under the rim, and stand it on a trivet or folded cloth in a pan of simmering water reaching halfway up the sides. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top up with boiling water; running the pan dry is the usual way these puddings are ruined.
- Four hours is not a misprintLong steaming is what softens the crumbs and swells the dried fruit into a set pudding. It is done when a skewer comes out clean and the top springs back.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. Rest the basin five minutes before turning out, and serve hot with custard, a thin sweet white sauce, or cream.
- SweetnessAn ounce and a half of sugar is very restrained by current standards, the fruit doing most of the work. If your carrots are old and woody rather than young and sweet, taste the raw mixture and adjust.
Carrot puddings belong to a long English tradition of using root vegetables to sweeten and moisten baked and steamed sweets, well established by the eighteenth century and revived hard whenever sugar, eggs and suet were short. This version is unmistakably of the latter sort: butter instead of suet, no eggs at all, breadcrumbs instead of flour, and a mere ounce and a half of sugar leaning on currants and sultanas for the rest. The substitution of butter for suet, which is beef fat, is worth noting in itself. Steaming for hours over a pot already on the stove was also cheaper than heating an oven, a calculation that shaped a great many British puddings long before rationing gave it fresh urgency.