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Eve's Pudding
A favorite variety of the plum pudding order, light and not too rich. Also called pouding a la Francaise. The pundit who put the receipt in verse was not concerned about the needs of large hotel. 1 pound of bread crumbs cut fine. 1/2 pound of chopped suet. 3/4 pound of seedless raisins, or currants. 3/4 pound of chopped apples. 1/2 a nutmeg grated.
Mix the above together dry; then beat together: 9 eggs Salt. 1/4 pound of sugar. 1 teaspoonful of lemon extract. Stir all well together; tie the mixture in two cloths, leaving a little room to swell, and boil without stoppage 4 hours. When eggs are scarce 5 or 6 will do with half a cup of milk added. Butter and sugar sauce is suitable; though one says, "Adam won't like it without wine and sugar." "Such," says Bulwer, "is the constant habit of young people. They think anything expensive is necessarily good." Bulwer was young himself at that time and must have known how it was. If the obverse was as invariably the case we should expect to find but few admirers of the following, which is the cheapest pudding made. Certainly it is not the case in this direction, for we find no difficulty in disposing of large quantities of this pudding of many names. However, it must be properly baked, and ought to be in a brick oven, otherwise it has no goodness at all. The theory of rice pudding is--by the way, perhaps you did not know there was a theory of rice pudding? Yes, indeed. This is a great day for theories, and there is a pudding theory as well as a nebular theory and an atomic theory and an evolution theory; and as there will be unlimited time to study the others after we are done with pudding it is evident the pudding theory should stand first.--The rice pudding theory teaches that all the richness is derived from the evaporation and condensation of the milk. As one pint of rice will absorb three pints of milk and no more, the baking has to be so protracted that the pudding is made to contain the condensed richness of six pints of milk, half of it, the watery part being dried out in the oven. As a matter of course the richer the milk and the more cream it contains the better it will be to start with. Baked Rice and Milk Pudding. Asto<??> House Pudding. English Rice Pudding.
A boiled suet pudding of the plum-pudding family, scaled for a hotel kitchen. The technique — a cloth-tied batter kept at a rolling boil for hours — is the part that needs translating, not the ingredients.
- The hinge: the water must never stop boiling"Boil without stoppage 4 hours" is the whole instruction. If the pot goes off the boil or runs low, the pudding stops setting and turns dense and sodden in the middle. Keep a kettle of boiling water alongside and top up so the pudding stays covered the entire time.
- YieldThe ingredients come to roughly 4 lb of raw mixture in all, about 2 lb in each of the two cloths. Halve it for a household, or divide into more, smaller cloths and shorten the boil accordingly.
- Pudding clothsUse unbleached muslin or a clean cotton tea towel, scalded, wrung out, then floured on the inside surface. The flour forms the skin that keeps water out. Tie loosely as directed — the crumbs and eggs swell — and suspend the bundle rather than letting it sit flat on the pot bottom. A buttered pudding basin with a pleated foil-and-parchment cover, steamed rather than boiled, does the same job with less anxiety.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys; ask a butcher, or use packaged shredded suet. It melts at a higher temperature than butter, which is why the crumb sets open and light rather than greasy. Frozen suet grates far more easily than fresh.
- Bread crumbs "cut fine"Dry, stale crumbs from a plain white loaf, not the sandy commercial kind and not fresh soft crumbs — the latter absorb too much egg and pack tight. A pound of dry crumbs is roughly 4 to 5 cups, loosely measured, more if they are coarse and light.
- Lemon extractPeriod lemon extract was likely stronger and more resinous than finely grated zest. The zest of one to two lemons is a closer match to the fruit and suet.
- The egg reductionThe recipe allows five or six eggs with half a cup of milk "when eggs are scarce," an economy rather than a first choice. Fewer eggs with a little milk give a softer, more bread-pudding texture; nine give something firmer that slices cleanly.
- Sauce"Butter and sugar sauce" is unspecified here; it is most likely a hard sauce — butter creamed with sugar, chilled, and set on the hot pudding to melt — and the wine version mentioned would be the same with sherry or brandy beaten in.
- Ignore the rice pudding tailThe passage after the sauce note belongs to the next receipts in the book — the theory of evaporating milk applies to baked rice pudding, not to this one.
Eve's pudding takes its name, by tradition, from the apple, and in nineteenth-century English cookbooks it was often printed as a rhyme, which is the "pundit who put the receipt in verse" the author is grumbling at; the verse quantities suit a family, not a hotel range, and the author has simply rescaled the dish in pounds and moved on. The dish sits at the plainer end of the boiled-pudding family: no flour, no brandy soaking, no long maturing, just crumbs, suet, dried fruit and apple set with a great many eggs and boiled in a cloth — the everyday form of the technique that produces Christmas plum pudding at its most elaborate. Boiled puddings dominated English and Anglo-American dessert cookery for as long as the open hearth did, because a pot of water needed no oven and no skill in managing a fire.