Monday's Pudding
INGREDIENTS. The remains of cold plum-pudding, brandy, custard made with 4 eggs to every pint of milk.
Cut the remains of a good cold plumpudding into finger-pieces, soak them in a little brandy and lay them cross-barred in a mould until full. Make a custard with the above proportion of milk and eggs, flavouring it with nutmeg or lemon-rind; fill up the mould with it; tie it down with a cloth and boil or steam it for an hour.
Serve with a ittle of the custard poured over, to which has been added a tablespoonful of brandy. TIME.-1 hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A thrift dish built on leftovers, so the quantities are deliberately vague. The one thing to control is heat: this is a baked-custard mixture cooked in a water-filled pot, and if it boils hard it will curdle and weep.
- Steam, do not boilDespite the instruction to "boil or steam", keep the water at a bare shiver around the mould. An egg custard sets at about 175-180F; a rolling boil takes it past that and you get a grainy, watery pudding.
- The custard proportionFour eggs to a pint of milk is a firm, sliceable custard. An imperial pint is 20 fl oz (about 570 ml), so scale down slightly if you are working from US pints. How much custard a mould will take depends on how tightly the pudding pieces are packed, so mix the full quantity and use what fits.
- How much pudding"The remains" of a plum pudding means whatever you have; figure on filling the mould two-thirds full with the finger-pieces before the custard goes in. Too much pudding and there is no custard to bind it.
- Soaking in brandyA few tablespoons is enough to moisten, not to drown. Cold plum pudding is dense and absorbs slowly, so give it fifteen minutes before laying it in the mould.
- Tying down the clothButter the mould, then cover it with pleated baking parchment and foil tied with string rather than a bare cloth, which lets steam condense straight into the custard. The pleat gives the pudding room to rise.
- Timing and donenessThe hour given in the recipe suits a mould of about a pint and a half, though no size is specified. Test with a skewer at the centre: it should come out clean, with no liquid custard. A larger mould needs longer, not hotter.
- Turning outRest the mould ten minutes before inverting, or the custard will slump. Run a thin knife around the edge first.
- YieldFour to six, at a guess, since the quantity depends entirely on how much pudding is left over. The sauce is simply extra custard from the same batch, so hold back a few spoonfuls before filling the mould and stir the brandy in off the heat.
The name is often read as the whole point: Sunday brought the plum pudding, Monday brought what was left of it, dressed up so it did not look like leftovers. Victorian household cookery treated the reuse of cold pudding, cold joint and cold potato as a matter of managerial competence rather than poverty, and Beeton's book is full of these second-day dishes with their pointedly domestic names. Plum pudding itself contains no plums; "plums" was long-standing English usage for raisins and other dried fruit, a survival from the days when the boiled pudding was closer to a spiced fruit-and-suet mixture in a cloth. Encasing the pieces in custard and steaming them again is the same logic as a cabinet pudding, which builds a moulded sweet out of stale cake or biscuit and an egg custard, and which appears elsewhere in the same book.