Home › Puddings and Desserts › Newmarket Pudding
Newmarket Pudding
1 pint milk Bread crumbs 2 eggs 1 cup currants 1 cup raisins 1/2 nutmeg, grated 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1/4 teaspoon cloves 1 tablespoon butter 1/4 teaspoon salt Thicken the milk with the bread crumbs; add the beaten egg and other ingredients and bake for two hours. Serve with lemon or vanilla sauce.
A plain baked bread-and-fruit pudding of the type every cook of the period could assemble from memory, which is why the instructions assume so much. Two things need filling in: the oven and the crumb-to-milk ratio.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A pudding of this kind would have gone into a slow to moderate oven, perhaps 300-325F, at which two hours is plausible for a deep dish; the recipe itself calls for no water bath. Much above 350F an egg-and-milk mixture is liable to curdle and weep before the centre sets.
- "Thicken the milk with the bread crumbs"This is the hinge of the recipe. Add dry crumbs to the pint of milk until you have a loose, spoonable batter that just holds its shape, roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of crumbs, then let it stand 15 minutes so the bread swells before you judge it again. Too few crumbs and it bakes as sweetened milk; too many and it is stodgy.
- No sugar in the listWhether sugar was left out deliberately or lost in printing cannot be told from the page, but the pudding works as a barely sweet one, relying on the dried fruit and on the lemon or vanilla sauce poured over. If you want it sweet on its own, 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar beaten in with the eggs is in keeping.
- Half a nutmegA whole nutmeg grates to about 2 to 3 teaspoons, so half is a heaped teaspoon. With the cinnamon and cloves this is an assertively spiced pudding by current taste; start with half if you are unsure.
- Currants and raisinsCurrants here are dried Zante currants, not fresh blackcurrants. Both fruits are better plumped in hot water or milk for ten minutes and drained, or they draw moisture from the custard and sink.
- EggsTwo eggs to a pint of milk is a light set. Eggs of the period are often said to have run smaller than today's large; two large eggs give a firmer pudding, which is no bad thing in a dish carrying this much fruit.
- Dish and yieldA 1 1/2-quart baking dish, buttered. The recipe does not specify a water bath. Serves four to six.
- The sauceLemon or vanilla sauce in a book of this kind usually means a sweet sauce thickened with cornstarch: sugar, water or milk, a little starch, butter, and the flavouring stirred in off the heat. A vanilla sauce could also be a thin pouring custard.
Newmarket pudding belongs to the large family of English baked bread puddings named after towns and houses, and the name is generally traced to the Suffolk racing town rather than to any documented originating cook. Recipes under the title vary considerably from book to book, some layering sliced bread with jam and spice, others, like this one, simply soaking crumbs in spiced milk with dried fruit; what they share is the frugal logic of the boarding-house and family table, where stale bread and a little milk were made to go a long way. Its presence in a loose-leaf American cook book of the early twentieth century shows how durable that English repertoire remained in the United States: heavily spiced with nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves, served with a sauce, and cheap enough to be made on a weekday. Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf format, with pages meant to be removed and rearranged, was itself a selling point of the era, aimed at cooks who wanted a working file rather than a book to read.