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Green Ginger Pudding
4 ounces bread crumbs 4 ounces green ginger 2 ounces flour 1/4 pint of milk 2 ounces butter In weighing the ginger for this pudding, it is best to weigh it in the basin in which it will be mixed, then the syrup will not be wasted. Weigh the basin first, and then put in the ginger with a proper proportion of the syrup. Cut up the ginger in bits about as large as a pea. Add the bread crumbs to the ginger. Heat the milk, melting the butter in it, and pour it over the bread crumbs and ginger. Now mix in the flour very carefully, and stir well together. Pour the mixture in a well buttered mold, and steam for three hours. Serve with any sweet sauce.
A plain steamed pudding that leans entirely on preserved ginger for both sweetness and flavour. Two things decide whether it works: what you buy as "green ginger", and how you cover the mould.
- "Green ginger" means preserved stem gingerThe instruction to weigh it with "a proper proportion of the syrup" shows this is ginger preserved in syrup, sold in jars as stem ginger or Canton ginger. Fresh ginger root has no syrup and would make 4 ounces of it savage and stringy in a sweet pudding.
- The syrup is the only sugarThere is no sugar in the ingredient list, so the sweetness comes from whatever syrup clings to the ginger. Judge it by taste before it goes in the mould, and expect a restrained, almost bready pudding rather than a sweet one.
- Weights and the quarter pint4 ounces of fresh breadcrumbs is roughly 2 cups loosely packed; 2 ounces of flour is about 1/2 cup. A British quarter pint is 5 fluid ounces, a little over half a US cup — if you are working from US measures, err on the wet side, as the crumbs drink a great deal.
- No eggs, no suetButter melted into the milk stands in for the beef suet usual in steamed puddings of this type, and nothing binds the mixture but starch from the flour and crumbs. The result is dense and close-textured; do not expect the open crumb of an egg-and-suet pudding.
- Covering the mouldThe recipe tells you to butter the mould but says nothing about covering it; cover with buttered paper or foil, pleated to allow rise, and tie it down before it goes over the water. Uncovered, condensation drips in and the top turns to paste.
- Steaming and the water levelThree hours in a covered pan of gently simmering water, filled to about halfway up the basin, with boiling water topped up as it falls. The quantities here make only a small pudding, so it may well be cooked through before the full three hours; test with a skewer to the centre.
- ServingBest warm, turned out and sliced. The reserved ginger syrup thinned with a little water, or a plain custard, would both answer to the 'sweet sauce' called for.
"Green ginger" was an English term for fresh, undried ginger as distinct from the dried and ground spice, and it was also applied to young rhizomes preserved in heavy syrup and shipped in jars from Canton, a familiar grocery item in Britain and America. Steamed puddings of this shape -- crumbs and flour bound with fat and steamed for hours in a basin -- were a staple dessert of the period, and commonly depended on beef or mutton suet; butter melted into hot milk does that work here. Substitutions of this kind turn up in vegetarian recipe collections of the period.