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Valentia Pudding
8 ounces of bread or rusk crumbs 3 ounces of Valentia raisins 1 ounce of butter 1 pint of milk 3 ounces of sugar Vanilla or wine to flavor Put the milk and butter on to boil. When it boils, add the crumbs, sugar, stoned and coarsely chopped raisins. Boil for two or three minutes, and put aside to cool. Add the flavoring to the cool mixture. Pour into a greased mold or basin, cover the top with a greased paper, and steam for two hours. Allow the pudding to stand until it shrinks away from the side of the basin, which will be in a minute or two. Turn out carefully on a hot dish. Serve with a sweet sauce.
A plain steamed bread pudding with no eggs in it — the crumbs and the long steaming do all the setting. A few points make the difference between a light pudding and a dense one.
- Crumbs are the structureWith no eggs binding it, the pudding holds together only because soft bread crumbs swell in hot milk. Use fresh soft crumbs from a plain white loaf, not dry packaged crumbs, which absorb far more liquid and give a heavy, pasty result.
- RuskRusk is bread baked a second time until dry and crisp, closer to a zwieback or a hard biscotti than to anything sold as a crumb today. Zwieback or plain dry toast crushed fine is the nearest substitute; because it is drier than fresh crumb, expect the mixture to stiffen more as it cools.
- Valentia raisinsA spelling of Valencia, a large Spanish raisin that still contained its seeds, which is why the recipe says to stone them. Modern seedless raisins need no stoning; use 3 oz (a generous 1/2 cup) and chop them coarsely as directed so they distribute rather than sink.
- A pintAn American pint is 2 cups; if the book is following British measure it is 20 fl oz. Either works here, but the smaller quantity gives a firmer pudding. Judge by the mixture: it should be thick and spoonable, not pourable, before it goes into the mold.
- Flavoring quantitiesThe original gives none. About a teaspoon of vanilla extract, or 2 tablespoons of sherry or Madeira, is in keeping. Add it off the heat and cooled, as instructed, so the alcohol and the volatile aromatics are not driven off.
- The mold and the paperA 1-quart pudding basin or metal mold, well buttered. Greased paper — parchment now — should be pleated across the top and tied or fitted snugly to keep condensation off the surface. Foil over the parchment is a reasonable modern addition.
- SteamingSet the covered basin on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, cover, and keep it at a bare simmer for the full two hours, topping up with boiling water as needed. A rolling boil rattles the basin and forces water past the cover.
- Turning outThe instruction to wait a minute or two is the hinge. Steamed puddings contract slightly as they cool and release themselves; turned out immediately, this eggless pudding tears, and left much longer it sticks fast.
- Yield and sauceServes four to six. A sweet sauce here means a thin custard, a hard sauce creamed from butter and sugar, or a simple wine or lemon sauce thickened with cornstarch.
Steamed puddings were a staple of cookbooks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and this one is instructive for what it leaves out: no eggs, no suet, no gelatin. The whole class of boiled and steamed puddings descends from the older English practice of cooking a pudding in a cloth alongside or after the meat, and the pudding basin — earthenware or ceramic as often as enamelled or tinned metal — eventually replaced the cloth. The name is usually taken to point to the raisin rather than to any place the dish was made — Valencia raisins, large and seeded, were one of several named grades on the grocer's shelf alongside Sultanas, Muscatels and currants, and a recipe title naming the grade was ordinary shorthand for the kind of fruit wanted. Seedless varieties largely displaced them in the twentieth century, which is why the instruction to stone the fruit now reads as odd.