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Ginger Pudding No. 2
1/2 pound bread crumbs 1/4 pound butter 1/4 pound moist sugar 2 large tablespoons of ginger Warm the butter, and mix with the sugar; mix the ginger with the bread crumbs; then mix all together thoroughly, put into a buttered basin, and steam for three or four hours.
A plain steamed crumb pudding with no eggs, no flour and no liquid beyond the butter — spare even by the standards of its day. A few things need translating before it will work.
- The ginger is the questionTwo large tablespoons of dried ground ginger against half a pound of crumbs is ferociously hot and slightly gritty. Unqualified 'ginger' in a recipe of this date normally means ground ginger; if you want a milder pudding, 2 to 3 teaspoons is closer to modern taste.
- Moist sugarAn unrefined soft sugar, damp and pale brown. Light muscovado or soft light brown sugar is the direct equivalent; it also supplies moisture the recipe otherwise lacks.
- Bread crumbsSoft fresh crumbs from a day-old white loaf, not the dry sandy crumbs sold for coating. Half a pound is roughly 4 to 5 cups loosely packed. Dried crumbs will give you a brick.
- It needs bindingAs written there is nothing to hold the pudding together — no egg, no milk, no syrup. Many comparable crumb puddings of the period do include eggs and milk. Without some liquid, expect a crumbly mass rather than a sliceable pudding.
- Basin and coveringA 1-pint (600 ml) ceramic pudding basin, well buttered, covered with pleated greaseproof paper and foil and tied under the rim. The pleat gives the pudding room to rise and keeps condensation out.
- SteamingSet the basin on a trivet or folded cloth in a deep pan, water to halfway up the sides, lid on, at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water as it drops. Three hours is ample for a pint basin; four suits a larger one.
- YieldAbout a pound of finished pudding, serving four to six as written.
Steamed puddings of this kind lived on stale bread, and the crumb pudding was the household's standing answer to the loaf that had gone past slicing. The traditional English ginger pudding was commonly bound with shredded beef suet, and butter here stands in its place. Ginger itself had been a British baking staple for centuries by then, cheap in ground form and familiar from gingerbread and ginger beer. "Moist sugar" is a period trade term rather than a brand — it distinguished the soft, damp, partly refined sugars from loaf sugar, which had to be nipped and pounded before use.