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Fig Pudding No. 2
4 ounces of bread crumbs 3 ounces of figs 1/2 lemon rind 1/2 pint milk 1 tablespoon sugar Chop the figs into small pieces, and mix well with the bread crumbs, sugar and grated lemon rind. Add the milk, and mix all well together; pour into a well-buttered basin, and steam for three hours.
A plain steamed bread pudding with nothing to bind it but soaked crumbs and milk, so the texture depends entirely on the crumbs being fine and the soak being thorough.
- Weights, not cups4 oz of fresh soft breadcrumbs is roughly 2 cups loosely packed; 3 oz of dried figs is about half a cup chopped. Weigh if you can, since crumb volume varies wildly with how coarsely you grate.
- The half pintAmerican books of this period mean 8 fl oz; British ones mean 10. Start with 8 fl oz and add more only if the crumbs are still dry after ten minutes of soaking — the mixture should be loose and sloppy, not stiff.
- "Basin"A pudding basin: a deep, straight-sided heatproof bowl, filled about two-thirds and covered with buttered parchment and foil, tied or crimped tight. Any ovenproof bowl of 1 to 1.5 pint capacity works.
- FigsDried figs, not fresh. Cut off the hard stem nubs and chop small; if they are leathery, cover with hot water for ten minutes and drain before mixing, or they will stay tough in the finished pudding.
- Let it soakThe recipe says mix and steam, but the crumbs need fifteen minutes standing in the milk before they go into the basin. Otherwise the centre steams into a dry, granular pocket.
- Steaming setupStand the covered basin on a trivet or folded cloth in a lidded pot with boiling water halfway up its side, and keep it at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water as it drops; three hours will empty a shallow pan.
- Three hours is honestA long steam for a small basin, but it is what softens the fig into the crumb and sets the pudding firm. You can shorten it to about 90 minutes for a lighter, wetter pudding, but the sliceable texture the recipe intends needs the full time.
- Yield and servingServes two to three. Turn out while hot and serve with custard, cream or a lemon sauce — with only one tablespoon of sugar and no eggs it is a deliberately thrifty pudding and wants something poured over it.
This belongs to the long English line of steamed bread puddings, in which stale crumbs stand in for flour and a small quantity of dried fruit does all the sweetening and flavouring work. Many versions of such a pudding were bound with chopped beef suet; with no suet here, milk and crumbs carry the whole thing, which is why the long steam matters so much. The numbered title suggests the compiler collected several fig puddings and printed them side by side, a common habit in period collections assembled from contributed and reprinted sources.