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Omnibus Pudding
6 ounces of flour or rusk crumbs 4 ounces of butter 6 ounces of sultanas 4 ounces of golden syrup 1/2 pint milk Mix the butter and flour together, and add the sultanas. Warm the syrup and milk together, and add to the rest. Steam in a well buttered basin for four hours. Serve with any white sauce.
A plain steamed pudding of the wartime type: no eggs, no sugar beyond the syrup, and nothing to raise it. It works, but it is dense by design, so the batter consistency and the water level under the basin matter more than anything else.
- Weights in cups6 oz flour is about 1 1/3 cups; 4 oz butter is one stick; 6 oz sultanas about 1 1/4 cups; 4 oz golden syrup roughly 1/3 cup. Weigh if you can — the flour figure is the one that shifts most with scooping.
- Half a pintThis is a British book, so the half pint is 10 fl oz, not 8. Use 1 1/4 cups of milk; with only 8 oz the mixture will be noticeably stiffer.
- Rusk crumbsRusk is a hard, twice-baked bread, and rusk crumbs were a commercial commodity used as a filler. Dry unseasoned breadcrumbs or crushed plain melba toast stand in. Crumbs tend to give a lighter, more open pudding than the flour version.
- Golden syrupAn inverted cane syrup, still sold under the Lyle's tin and worth seeking out — it is more caramel-toned than corn syrup. Light corn syrup works but tastes flatter; honey changes the flavour markedly.
- Nothing to raise itThere is no egg and no leavening, so "mix the butter and flour together" means rub the butter in as for pastry, keeping some texture. The pudding sets rather than rises. A teaspoon of baking powder in the flour is a common modern liberty if you want it lighter.
- The basin and the steamUse a 1 1/2 pint (about 850 ml) pudding basin, butter it well, and cover with buttered parchment and foil tied under the rim so condensation cannot drip in. Stand it on a trivet in a pan of simmering water reaching halfway up, lid on, and top up with boiling water as it drops — running dry is the one failure that cannot be recovered.
- Four hoursThat is genuine for a dense flour pudding of this size and gives the sultanas time to swell and the crumb to darken. A crumb-based version may cook faster, though the recipe gives no separate time for it. It is cooked when a skewer comes out clean and the pudding shrinks slightly from the basin.
- "Any white sauce"In this period that means a sweet pouring sauce: milk thickened with a little cornflour and sugar, vanilla optional. Custard is the obvious alternative.
- YieldServes four to six. It reheats well — steam wedges for 20 minutes, or microwave a portion briefly with a spoonful of milk.
"Omnibus" is Latin for "for all, for everybody," and the name suits a pudding assembled from whatever the store cupboard held. The economy shows in the details: no eggs, no separate sugar, dried fruit doing the sweetening work alongside a few ounces of syrup, and rusk crumbs offered as an alternative to flour because either might be the thing you actually had. Steamed puddings also had a practical advantage: they cooked over a burner or on the back of a range, using no oven at all.