Indian Pudding
INGREDIENTS for pudding large enough for 6 persons.-4 large apples, a little grated nutmeg, 1 teaspoonful of minced lemon-peel, 2 large tablespoonfuls of sugar, 6 oz of currants, lb. of suet crust. AVERAGE COST, 11d.
Pare, core and cut the apples into slices; put them into a saucepan with the nutmeg, INVALID COOKERY. lemon-peel and sugar, stew them over the fire till soft; then have ready the above quantity of crust, roll it out thin, spread the apples over the paste, sprinkle over the currants, roll the pudding up, closing the ends properly, tie it in a floured cloth, and boil for 2 hours.
TIME.-2 hours.
SEASONABLE August to March.'
A rolled boiled suet pudding of stewed apple and currants — closer to what most British books call an apple roly-poly than to the cornmeal-and-molasses American dish the title suggests. The method is simple; the two things that decide success are the cloth and a steady, unbroken boil.
- The ambiguous quantityThe suet crust is given as "lb." with the fraction lost in printing. Comparable Beeton rolled suet puddings for six call for something in the region of ½ to ¾ lb of suet crust; treat that as the likely reading rather than a certainty.
- SuetShredded beef suet, sold in boxes in Britain, is the intended fat; frozen grated butter or a vegetarian shredded suet both work, though butter gives a softer, less springy crust.
- The clothA clean cotton or linen cloth, scalded in boiling water, wrung out, then floured generously on the side that touches the pastry. The flour sets into a skin that keeps water out. Tie or pin the ends loosely so the crust can swell.
- Keep it off the bottomLower the pudding into fast-boiling water on an upturned saucer or a folded cloth, and keep the water at a rolling boil for the whole two hours, topping up from a kettle. If the boil drops the crust turns grey and sodden.
- Or steam itTwo hours of steaming in foil and baking parchment, pleated to allow expansion, gives the same result with much less watching and no risk of a leaking cloth.
- Cool the fillingThe stewed apple must be cold before it goes on the pastry, and drained of loose juice, or the crust softens and splits along the roll.
- CurrantsDried currants, the small black Zante kind — not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Modern packets are clean; the Victorian instruction to wash and pick them over is no longer needed.
- Yield and servingServes six. Unroll onto a warmed dish, cut in thick rounds, and serve with custard, cream or plain sugar. Leftovers steam back to life; they will not reheat well in an oven.
The heading is misleading: this is an English boiled apple roll, and "Indian pudding" in American books means an entirely different thing — cornmeal baked slowly with molasses and milk. Beeton's book ran through many editions after her death in 1865, with recipes reset, reordered and occasionally mislabelled by later editors; the stray words "INVALID COOKERY" in the middle of the text are most likely a stray heading or running head from elsewhere in the book that has drifted into the recipe, and the title may have wandered in much the same way. What the recipe itself shows is how the Victorian kitchen stretched a small amount of fruit into a substantial dish: suet crust, a floured cloth and a pot of boiling water needed no oven, which mattered in a household where the range was lit for other work. The seasonal note, August to March, is the natural life of stored apples before cold storage and imports made them a year-round fruit.