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Lemon Pudding, Plain
INGREDIENTS for pudding for 6 persons. lb. of flour, 6 oz. of lard or dripping, the juice of 1 large lemon, 1 teacupful of flour, sugar.
AVERAGE COST, 7d.
Make the above proportion of flour and lard into a smooth paste and roll it out to the thickness of about 1/2 an inch. Squeeze the lemon-juice, strain it into a cup, stir the flour into it and as much moist sugar as will make it into a stiff and thick paste; spread this mixture over the paste, roll it up, secure the ends and tie the pudding in a floured cloth. Boil for 2 hours.
TIME.-2 hours.
SEASONABLE at any time.
This is a boiled roly-poly: a lard crust rolled up around a stiff lemon-and-sugar filling and cooked in a cloth. Two things decide whether it works — the paste must be bound properly and the water must never stop boiling.
- The flour quantity is incompleteThe ingredient list opens with "lb. of flour" and the fraction has been lost. Six ounces of fat would suit anything from about half a pound to a pound of flour, and the original figure cannot be recovered with certainty.
- Water for the pasteNo liquid is listed, yet flour and lard will not come together without it. Add cold water a spoonful at a time until the dough just coheres, then stop — a wet suet-style crust turns heavy and grey.
- A teacupfulIn Victorian measure a teacup is about 5 fl oz, so roughly two-thirds of a modern cup. Here it is a thickener, not a batter, so judge by texture: enough flour and moist sugar to make the lemon juice into a paste that will sit on the crust without running off.
- Moist sugarThis means an unrefined soft brown sugar. Light muscovado is the closest thing on a supermarket shelf; it also gives the filling its colour, so white sugar will make a paler, sharper pudding.
- DrippingBeef dripping is still sold in some butchers and supermarkets, and lard remains widely available. Either gives a firmer crust than butter.
- The clothScald the cloth in boiling water, wring it out and flour the inside generously before wrapping. Tie the ends and the seam so the filling cannot escape, but leave a little slack — the crust swells as it cooks.
- Keeping it boilingThe pudding must be fully covered and the water kept at a steady boil for the whole two hours, topped up only with boiling water from a kettle. A lull in the boil lets water soak into the crust. If you have no cloth, the same mixture steams in a greased basin under pleated paper and foil, though steamed it may need a little longer.
- Yield and servingSix modest portions. Serve hot in thick slices, traditionally with custard or a plain sweet white sauce.
Boiled puddings tied in a cloth were the backbone of English domestic cookery for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, because they needed only a pot of water over an open fire rather than an oven. The roly-poly form -- a rolled sheet of suet, lard or dripping paste with jam, treacle, currants or, as here, a fruit-juice paste inside -- gave endless cheap variation on one crust. The word "plain" in the title marks this off from the richer baked lemon puddings elsewhere in the same book. At sevenpence for six people it is a costed household dish, and the note that it is "seasonable at any time" is a standard formula used throughout the book.