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Boiled Lemon Pudding. English
A lemon suet pudding, pale yellow, rich. 1 pound of flour. 1 pound of suet chopped fine. 1 pound of white bread crumbs. 1/2 pound of white sugar. 4 lemons. 4 eggs. 2 pints of milk. 1 teaspoonful of salt. 1 level teaspoonful of soda.
Make the bread crumbs fine either by grating or cutting in thinnest slices and squares across. Mix all the dry articles together except soda and salt, which dissolve in the milk. Grate the lemon rindsin. Mix up with the milk and eggs. Squeeze in the lemon juice at last. Tie up in 2 pudding cloths, wetted and floured, and boil 3 hours. Hard sauce cream sauce, golden sauce or wine. The missing link in this evolution of puddings from duff to English plum is Eve's pudding, which can be found easily some distance back, and thence back to the place of beginning at plum pudding corner.
Now if it were right and proper or even allowable to base an hypothesis upon pudding, we should say that the great mistake of Bulwer's life was in wishing that his countrymen were Frenchmen and in keeping them constantly reminded of his wish; and the great mistake of Dickens' life was in sneering at Americans for not being English. Dickens was forgiven because of his world-wide Anglo-Saxonism; Bulwer retains his hold only by sheer strength; through the polish and exact fit of his work, not through love or indulgence. Dickens was English even to the chops and tomato sauce of Pickwick and all the little bread and cheese and kisses repasts of his people. Bulwer sneered at the national Yorkshire pudding, and blackberry pudding, and boiled veal, and he is not popular. Hotel keepers are mindful of the dread warning. When all nations and peoples shall have come to think alike and eat alike, then the dreams of the universal peace society will be realized and there will be an universal language. In the meantime English inn keepers go on providing roast beef with Yorkshire pudding; pease pudding; boiled apple dumplings and tea and toast; and American hotel keepers doing business for profit keep up the supply of ham and eggs, oyster soup, turkey with cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie and mince pie, and coffee and Parker House rolls. All easy enough, and no need of stroking the fur the wrong way.
A full-sized English boiled suet pudding scaled for a hotel table: roughly three pounds of dry goods before the milk goes in. Everything here works today, but the cloth-boiling and the sheer volume need translating.
- The hinge: acid last, then straight into the waterThe soda is dissolved in the milk and the lemon juice is squeezed in at the very end, which is what lifts a heavy suet batter. Once the juice goes in the reaction begins immediately, so have the cloths wetted, floured and waiting, and get the puddings tied and into boiling water without delay.
- YieldThis makes two large puddings; each should serve a table of eight or more, though the recipe gives no number. Halving the recipe for a single pudding is straightforward; the boiling time stays at three hours for a pudding of the same size.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, chopped fine rather than melted. A butcher will usually supply it on request; packaged shredded suet is sold in British import aisles. Vegetable suet behaves much the same. Do not substitute butter, which melts out rather than steaming the crumb open.
- MeasuresPints here are American, so 2 pints is 4 cups of milk. The pound weights are weights, not cups: a pound of flour is about 3 1/2 cups, a pound of fresh white breadcrumbs is a very large bowlful.
- LemonsFour lemons may well have been smaller than a modern supermarket lemon; three large ones give about the right zest and juice. Grate only the yellow, since the white pith turns the pudding bitter over three hours of boiling.
- The pudding clothScald the cloth, wring it, and flour the inside surface generously; the flour forms the skin that keeps water out. Tie loosely enough for the pudding to swell by a third. A greased pudding basin covered with pleated parchment and foil, steamed rather than submerged, is the modern equivalent and gives a neater shape.
- BoilingThe water must stay at a steady boil the whole three hours and must cover the pudding; top up from a kettle of boiling water, never cold, or the pudding sets heavy. Rest the cloth on a plate or trivet so it does not sit on the pan bottom.
- The saucesHard sauce is creamed butter and powdered sugar, often with brandy; golden sauce is usually a version enriched with egg yolk, though period recipes vary; wine sauce is a thin sweetened sauce finished with sherry or Madeira. Any of them wants to be served alongside, not poured over in the kitchen.
- KeepingBoiled suet puddings keep several days refrigerated in the cloth or basin and reheat well with 30 to 45 minutes of further steaming. They are better on the second day than the first.
Boiled puddings in a floured cloth were a workhorse of the English kitchen from the seventeenth century onward, since a cloth and a pot of water were available to households with no oven at all. Suet, flour and breadcrumbs gave a batter that cooked slowly in its own steam and stretched a small amount of sugar and fruit across many people. The lemon version sits at the plain end of the family the author sketches here, from a sailor's duff through Eve's pudding to full plum pudding; each step adds fruit, spice and spirits to the same basic suet frame. The long digression about Bulwer-Lytton and Dickens is characteristic of this book, which was written for working American hotel and restaurant cooks, and the closing passage here argues that a house should serve the dishes its guests recognise as their own rather than chase foreign fashion.