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Aunt Martha's Pudding
INGREDIENTS for pudding for 5 or 6 persons. -6 oz. of bread-crumbs, 3 eggs, 2 oz. of butter, 2 oz. of sugar, 1 lemon, 1/4 lb. of raisins or sultanas, a teacupful of milk, a little nutmeg. AVERAGE COST, 10d.
Mix the bread-crumbs and sugar together, and pour the milk, boiling, over; next add AUSTRALIAN MEAT. and the juice, then the butter and nutmeg, and beat all together for a quarter of an hour. Butter a mould and stick it all over with the raisins, stoned but not halved, then pour in the mixture and boil for 1¼ hour.
TIME.-1¼ hour to boil the pudding.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A plain boiled bread-crumb pudding of the sort that closed a mid-week dinner in a Victorian household. It is simple to make once the sequence is straightened out, but the mould and the long steam are the parts that need translating.
- The hinge: line the mould with raisins firstButter the mould generously and press the stoned raisins against the sides and base before any batter goes in. They set into the surface as the pudding cooks and give the turned-out dome its pattern; tipped in with the mixture they simply sink.
- Order of workingSteep the crumbs and sugar in the boiling milk until swollen and cool enough to touch, then beat in the eggs, the grated lemon rind and juice, the softened butter and the nutmeg. Eggs added to scalding milk will scramble.
- The quarter-hour of beatingFifteen minutes of hand beating would have served to aerate a crumb pudding made without raising agents. Two or three minutes in a stand mixer, or a vigorous minute by hand, will stand in for it.
- Boiling the puddingA buttered pudding basin, covered with pleated greaseproof paper and foil and tied, set on a trivet in a pan of simmering water that comes halfway up the basin. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates so the pan never runs dry.
- Cooking timeThe stated time has lost its fraction in this printing. A pudding of this size and richness wants about an hour and a half of steady simmering; test with a skewer, which should come out clean, and rest five minutes before turning out.
- Sultanas and raisinsModern dried vine fruit is sold ready-stoned, so the instruction to stone them can be ignored. Keep them whole, as the recipe insists, rather than chopping.
- Quantities and cost6 oz breadcrumbs is about 3 cups loosely packed from a stale white loaf; a teacupful of milk is roughly 140-175 ml. The 10d costing is the household budget figure of the day and has no modern equivalent.
- ServingServes five or six as written. Custard, a lemon sauce made from the remaining juice, or plain cream all suit it; the pudding itself is only lightly sweetened.
Bread-crumb puddings like this one belong to the thrifty end of the Victorian sweet course, where yesterday's loaf was rescued rather than thrown out and the whole dish turned on eggs, milk and a little dried fruit. Boiling or steaming in a mould was a common method in kitchens where the oven was in demand for the roast, and a pudding could sit over the fire for an hour or more with little attention. The habit of naming such puddings after an aunt or a family friend was common in nineteenth-century collections; the names generally record a contributor or a household favourite rather than any documented person.