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Canned Peach Pudding
1 cup dry bread crumbs 1 pint boiling milk 2 tablespoons melted butter 1/2 cup sugar 4 eggs 2 cups canned peaches Soak the crumbs in the milk; add the butter, sugar, beaten eggs and mashed peaches. Pour into a buttered mold or tin can; cover closely and boil for two hours. Serve with lemon sauce. SUET PUDDING No. 1 1/2 cup chopped suet 1/2 cup seeded raisins 1½ cups flour 1/2 cup molasses 1/2 cup milk ¾ teaspoon soda Mix the ingredients thoroughly, adding the soda dissolved in the milk last. Pour into a buttered mold or can; cover closely_and boil three hours. Serve with hard or foamy sauce.
SUET PUDDING No. 2 1/2 teaspoon cloves 2 cups stale bread crumbs 1/2 cup chopped suet 1/2 cup molasses 1 egg 1 cup raisins 1 teaspoon cinnamon Pinch of salt 1 cup milk ¾ teaspoon soda Mix the ingredients thoroughly, adding the soda dissolved in the milk last. Cover closely in a buttered mold or tin can and boil for two hours. Serve with hard or foamy sauce. 2 cups flour 1/4 teaspoon salt
A steamed bread-and-custard pudding built on canned fruit, of the type meant to cook on top of the stove rather than in the oven. The method is straightforward; the details that matter are the mold and the water.
- "Boil" means steam"Boil" here means cooking the closed mold in water rather than in the oven -- the recipe gives no further detail. In practice the mold is best set on a rack in a kettle with water partway up its side, kept at a steady simmer rather than a rolling boil, since a hard boil rattles the mold and can force water past the cover.
- Cover closely, and grease wellButter the mold, then seal it with a tight lid or a doubled sheet of foil or parchment tied down with string. This is the hinge of the recipe: an open mold takes on condensation and the custard sets watery.
- Top up the kettleTwo hours will boil a kettle low. Keep a second pot of water hot and add it as needed so the level never drops below the halfway mark.
- A pint of milkTwo cups. Pour it boiling over the crumbs and let them swell before adding anything else, or the pudding will be lumpy.
- Temper the eggsThe milk is scalding when it meets the crumbs. Let the mixture cool to warm before the beaten eggs go in, or they will curdle in streaks.
- Canned peachesDrain them well before mashing; extra liquid will loosen the set. Two cups mashed is roughly one large can.
- Doneness and yieldA skewer into the centre should come out clean and the pudding should feel set rather than sloshing. Rest it ten minutes before unmolding. Serves six to eight.
- Lemon sauceA common period version is sugar and cornstarch cooked with water, then finished off the heat with butter, lemon juice and zest, poured thin over the hot slices.
Boiled and steamed puddings were the workhorse dessert of the nineteenth-century kitchen, cooked in a cloth or a covered mold over the same fire that did everything else, and they persisted in American cookbooks long after ovens became reliable. What likely dates this particular version is the fruit: commercially canned peaches are generally said to have been widely available and cheap by the early twentieth century, and cookbooks of the period seem to have recycled old suet-and-bread-crumb formulas around them, turning a winter pudding into something that could be made from the pantry shelf in any month. The instruction to use "a buttered mold or tin can" looks like a frugal touch of the same era, when an emptied fruit tin was a perfectly respectable pudding basin.