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Batter Pudding, Boiled
INGREDIENTS for good-sized pudding.-3 eggs, 1¼ oz. of butter, 1¼ pint of milk, 3 tablespoonfuls of flour, a little salt. AVERAGE COST, 7d.
Put the flour into a basin, and add sufficient milk to moisten it; carefully rub down all the lumps with a spoon, then BATTER PUDDING. pour in the remainder of the milk, and stir in the butter, which should be previously melted; keep beating the mixture, add the eggs and a pinch of salt, and, when the batter is quite smooth, put it into a wellbuttered basin, tie it down very tightly, and put it into boiling water; move the basin about for a few minutes after it is put into the water, to prevent the flour settling in any part, and boil for 1 hour.
This pudding may also be boiled in a floured cloth that has been wetted in hot water: it will then take a few minutes less than when boiled in a basin. Send batter puddings very quickly to table, and serve with sweet sauce, wine sauce, stewed fruit, or jam of any kind, when the latter is used, a little of it may be placed round the dish in small quantities, as a garnish.
TIME-1 hour in a basin, 1 hour in a cloth.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A plain boiled batter — essentially a Yorkshire pudding mixture steamed in a basin rather than baked in fat. It is easy, but the flour quantity as printed needs thought before you start.
- The flour is the ambiguous partThree tablespoonfuls of flour to an imperial pint (20 fl oz) of milk gives a very thin batter for something meant to hold its shape in a basin. The spoon may have been a larger one than ours, and may have been heaped; other boiled batter puddings of the period are often nearer 4 oz of flour to the pint. If yours pours like thin cream, add flour.
- PintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, not the American 16. Scale the milk accordingly if you are working from US cups.
- The basin and the clothA "basin" is a pudding basin — a deep ceramic bowl with sloping sides. Butter it well, fill no more than two-thirds, and tie the cover down tightly: greaseproof paper and foil pleated across the middle does the job that a floured cloth once did. The pleat gives the pudding room to rise.
- Keep the water boilingThe basin should sit in water reaching about halfway up its side, at a steady boil for the full hour, and be topped up only from a boiling kettle. Cold water added mid-cook drops the temperature and slows the setting.
- Why she says to move the basin aboutUncooked batter separates fast, and flour settling at the base of the basin gives a stodgy bottom and a watery top. A minute of gentle agitation as it goes in, or simply beating the batter again immediately before pouring, prevents it.
- Send it quicklyThe recipe is explicit about this. A boiled batter pudding is at its lightest straight out of the basin; standing does it no favours. Have the sauce or jam ready.
- Melted butterThe butter is melted before it goes in, as the recipe directs; stirred into a whole pint of milk it will not be hot enough to trouble the eggs.
- Yield and servingA pint-of-milk pudding of this kind serves four to six as a modest sweet course. Golden syrup, warmed jam, stewed fruit or a simple sugar-and-lemon sauce all suit it; "wine sauce" in this period means a sweetened sauce flavoured with sherry or madeira.
Boiled batter puddings belong to the older English tradition in which puddings were cooked in a cloth or basin over the fire rather than in an oven — a practical arrangement in kitchens where the range was busy and the pot was always on. Much the same batter, poured under roasting meat, becomes Yorkshire pudding; boiled in a basin and eaten with jam, it becomes a sweet course, costed here at sevenpence. The "seasonable at any time" note is characteristic: it flags a dish that depended on no market produce and could be relied on in February as much as in August.