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Dried or Fresh Fruit
- INGREDIENTS for a large pudding.-1½ pint of milk, 4 tablespoonfuls of flour, 3 eggs, 2 oz. of finelyshredded suet, 1/4 lb. of currants, a pinch of salt. AVERAGE COST, with dried fruit, 10d.
Mix the milk, flour and eggs to a smooth batter; add a little salt, the suet and the currants, which should be well washed, picked and dried; put the mixture into a buttered pie-dish, and bake in a moderate oven for 1¼ hour. When fresh fruits are in season, this pudding is exceedingly nice with damsons, plums, red currants, gooseberries or apples; when made with these, the pudding must be thickly sprinkled over with sifted sugar. Boiled batter pudding, with fruit, is made in the same manner, by putting the fruit into a buttered basin, and filling it up with batter made in the above proportion, but omitting the suet. It must be sent quickly to table and covered plentifully with sifted sugar.
TIME.-Baked batter pudding, with fruit, 14 to 1½ hour; boiled ditto, 1½ to 1 hour, allowing that both are made in the above proportion of batter. Smaller puddings will be done enough in 3/4 or 1 hour.
SEASONABLE at any time, with dried fruits.
A plain baked batter pudding — essentially a sweetened Yorkshire pudding batter with fruit through it — in the Victorian repertoire of cheap, filling nursery puddings. The proportions are sound; the printed times are garbled by the original typesetting and should be ignored in favour of judgement.
- The printed times are corrupt"14 to 1½ hour" is almost certainly 1¼ to 1½ hours baked; "1½ to 1 hour" for the boiled version cannot be read as it stands, and the intended upper figure is lost (the surviving "1½" suggests something longer rather than shorter). Bake until the batter is set to the centre and a knife comes out clean, roughly 50 to 60 minutes in a modern oven.
- Moderate oven350F / 180C / gas 4. Butter the dish generously and put it in the oven to heat for a minute before the batter goes in, which helps the pudding lift at the edges.
- Currants means driedThe 1/4 lb of currants in the ingredient list is dried Zante currants, not the red currants mentioned later among the fresh fruit options. That is 4 oz, about 113 g, or roughly three-quarters of a cup by volume, and the washing and drying matters.
- SuetTwo ounces of shredded beef suet, about 55 g. Packet shredded suet, beef or vegetarian, works directly. The original directs that it be omitted from the boiled version, without saying why.
- MeasuresAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so use 570 ml of milk rather than a US pint. Four tablespoonfuls of flour is a thin batter by design -- perhaps 40 to 60 g depending on how heaped the spoons are, giving something closer to a clafoutis than a cake.
- Rest the batterMixing the flour, eggs and milk smooth and leaving it half an hour before baking gives a lighter, less rubbery set. The original does not mention it.
- Fresh fruit needs drainingDamsons, plums, gooseberries and apples release a lot of liquid. Halve and stone stone fruit, slice apples thin, and expect a wetter pudding; sugar goes over the top after baking, as directed, not into the batter.
- The boiled versionA buttered pudding basin, fruit in the bottom, batter poured over, then a pleated round of buttered paper or foil tied down and the basin set in a pan of simmering water reaching halfway up. Turn out and serve immediately, as the original directs that it be sent quickly to table.
- YieldA "large pudding" here serves six as a family sweet. The average cost of 10d is a period detail, not a guide.
Batter puddings of this kind were the backbone of the Victorian household sweet course: milk, flour, eggs and whatever fruit was to hand or in the store cupboard, baked in a buttered pie-dish. Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management is full of them, each costed to the penny, because the book was written for young middle-class mistresses managing a servant and a budget rather than for cooks in great houses. The suet is the tell, and turns the batter into something that would satisfy after a small joint. The fresh-fruit version is to be sprinkled thickly with sifted sugar, while the dried-fruit version, marked "seasonable at any time", was the standby for the months when no orchard fruit was to be had.