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Chops, Gravies or Fish
INGREDIENTS.pint of walnut ketchup, pint of mushroom ditto, 2 tablespoonfuls of Indian soy, 2 tablespoonfuls of port wine; 1/4 oz. of white pepper, 2 oz. of shalots, oz. of cayenne, oz. of cloves, & pint of vinegar. AVERAGE Cost, 1s. 9d.
Put the whole of the ingredients into a bottle, and let it remain for a fortnight in a warm place, occasionally shaking up the contents. Strain, and bottle off for use.
This sauce will be found an agreeable addition to gravies, hashes, stews, &c.
Exeter Pudding. (Very Rich).-INGREDIENTS for large Pudding.-10 oz. of bread-crumbs, 4 oz. of sago, 7 oz. of finelychopped suet, 6 oz. of moist sugar, the rind of lemon, pint of rum, 7 eggs, 4 tablespoonfuls of cream, 4 small sponge-cakes, 2 oz. of ratafias, lb. of jam. AVERAGE COST, 2s. 8d.
Put the bread-crumbs into a basin with the sago, suet, sugar, minced lemon-peel, rum and 4 eggs; stir these ingredients well together, then add 3 more eggs and the cream, and let the mixture be well beaten.
Then butter a mould, strew in a few breadcrumbs, and cover the bottom with a layer of ratafias; then put in a layer of the mixture, then a layer of sliced spongecake, spread thickly with any kind of jam; then add some ratafias, then some of the mixture and sponge-cake, and so on until the mould is full, taking care that a layer of the mixture is on the top of the pudding. Bake in a good oven from to 1 hour and serve, with or without wine sauce.
TIME. From 1 to 14 hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Marbled Jelly.
Blanc-Mange.
Trifle. 0000 Almond Puddings.
Jam Pudding.
Rout Cakes.
Tartlets.
Apple Marmalade Tart Vanilla Cream.
Pear & Apple Dumplings.
Mince Pies.
Cherry Tart.
Charlotte Russe.
Dessert Biscuits.
Gingerbread Pudding.
Fruit Tart.
Christmas Plum Pudding.
Milk Pudding Apples & Rice.
SWEETS.
Pancakes.
"Fill your baskets high With fennel green and balm, and golden pines."-KEATS. FAIRY BUTTER.
Two separate items run together here: a bottled store sauce of the walnut-ketchup family, and Exeter Pudding, a rich steamed-style pudding that is in fact baked. Several of the quantities have lost their fractions, so treat the numbers below with care.
- Missing fractionsIn the sauce, the ketchups, vinegar, cayenne and cloves are all given as bare "pint" or "oz." with the fraction dropped; the pudding's rum and jam are likewise incomplete. Sauces of this type generally used something like half a pint each of walnut and mushroom ketchup, with smaller quantities of vinegar and spice, but the original figures cannot be recovered from this page.
- The hinge: bake it gentlyExeter Pudding is a custard-bound crumb pudding, not a cake. The book asks only for a "good oven" and gives no temperature; a moderate oven is what is wanted, and standing the mould in a tin of hot water will help keep the egg from curdling at the edges before the centre sets.
- Baking timeThe stated time has also lost its lower figure and its second reading is garbled; the surviving readings point to something between about an hour and an hour and a quarter. It is done when a skewer in the centre comes out clean and the top is set rather than liquid.
- RatafiasSmall, hard almond macaroons about the size of a coin, sold in Britain as ratafia biscuits; Italian amaretti are the nearest equivalent. Substitute crisp amaretti, broken if they are large.
- Sago and moist sugarSago is the starch pearl, sold in the same aisle as tapioca and interchangeable with small pearl tapioca; it thickens the pudding as the egg sets. "Moist sugar" is unrefined soft brown sugar, closest to modern light muscovado.
- SuetBeef suet was bought in a lump and chopped; packet shredded suet, beef or vegetable, is a direct swap by weight. It should be finely divided so it melts into the crumbs rather than leaving pockets of fat.
- Indian soyIn the sauce, this is simply soy sauce, imported and so labelled in the nineteenth century. A dark Chinese or Japanese soy is the nearest thing; the sauce is already very salty, so nothing more should be added.
- Steeping the sauceA fortnight in a warm place means somewhere like an airing cupboard or a sunny windowsill, shaken occasionally as the recipe directs, then strained and bottled. The vinegar and the salt in the soy do the preserving, and the strained sauce keeps in the refrigerator once opened.
- YieldThe pudding is headed "for large Pudding" and will serve eight to ten; it is very rich and wants only a spoonful of wine sauce or cream. Use a mould large enough to take the whole quantity in layers. The sauce is used by the teaspoon in gravies and stews.
Bottled store sauces of this kind were a mainstay of the Victorian larder: a cook made up a quantity of concentrated seasoning and spent the year adding spoonfuls to gravies, hashes and made-over meat. They are the domestic ancestors of the commercial bottled sauces that displaced them, and the ingredient list here — walnut and mushroom ketchup, soy, port, shallots, cayenne, cloves, vinegar — marks it out as a walnut and mushroom store sauce. Exeter Pudding belongs to the other Victorian tradition, the county-named rich pudding; the connection to Exeter is more a matter of naming fashion than of documented local origin. Its structure, layers of crumb mixture alternating with sponge cake, jam and ratafias, is essentially a trifle assembled to be baked rather than chilled, and the cost of 2s. 8d. given here marks it as a dish for a household with money to spend on eggs, cream and rum.