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Scotch Barley Pudding
1 pound of pearl or Scotch barley. 2 quarts of water. 6 ounces of butter. 8 ounces of sugar. 5 eggs. Salt. 1 1/2 pints of milk to mix with. 1/2 a nutmeg grated.
Wash the barley in several waters to free it from the meal. Boil it in the 2 quarts of water at the back of the range about 3 hours, with a tight lid on. Mix the other ingredients in and bake about half an hour. Currants and raisins can be added if desired. Two full quarts of barley ready cooked, if dry, answers the same.
The reason for inserting the preceeding good pudding there in haste was the ever present fear of stepping into an American pie if we did not shut off corn starch immediately.
Strange, but true, almost every pudding we touch and begin to polish up whisks us up and carries us over the water as quick as the genii did those who rubbed Aladdin's lamp. That puddings do not often belong here is due to the fact that while Uncle Sam's children love not pudding less they love pie more, and are very apt to call all things of native origination pie that would elsewhere be called pudding. This has been more than once before observed in these columns, and here is an example. There were the soldiers in the late great war, many of them from homes of plenty and luxury, little relishing the rough fare of the army commissariat, and some genius among them struck a culinary idea and invented "Lincoln pie." Wherefore Pie? It was a hard tack pudding in reality, but was made pie in obelience to a national instinct, and as Lincoln pie it had for a time an immense run of popularity far outside of the army, being sold in all the bakeries. The original was composed of hard--tack, bacon fat, molasses and dried apples, with a tough flour crust, but fat times and fat camps were occasionally encountered and then Lincoln pie blossomed out to this.
A large steamed-then-baked grain pudding of the British sort, written for a hotel kitchen and scaled accordingly. The instructions assume a coal range and a cook who knows what a baked custard should look like.
- The hinge: cook the barley to collapseThree hours at the back of the range means a bare simmer, tightly covered, until the grains are soft and the whole mass thick and glutinous. Barley that is still toothsome will give a loose, watery pudding, since the starch it sheds is what binds the custard.
- Wash it properly"Several waters to free it from the meal" refers to the polishing dust on pearl barley. Rinse until the water runs clear, or the finished pudding tastes chalky.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given. Bake at 350F; half an hour is right only if the barley mixture goes into the dish hot, otherwise allow 45 minutes to an hour and judge by a set, just-trembling centre.
- Measures1 1/2 pints of milk is 3 cups. Six ounces of butter is 1 1/2 sticks, 8 ounces of sugar is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons. Two quarts of water to a pound of barley will mostly be absorbed.
- The alternative quantity is ambiguous"Two full quarts of barley ready cooked, if dry" is a volume of already-boiled barley, not dry grain, and depends entirely on how wet the cook's batch is. Judge by consistency against the freshly boiled version rather than trusting the figure.
- Half a nutmeg is a lotThat is roughly 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons freshly grated for the whole pudding. It suits a bland grain base, but use less if you are unused to it.
- Temper the eggsThe barley comes off the fire near boiling. Let it cool to warm, or beat the eggs with the milk first and stir that into the barley, or you will have sweet scrambled egg through the pudding.
- Vessel and yieldThis fills a buttered 3- to 4-quart baking dish and serves ten to twelve, so it suits a large table rather than a household; halve it freely. Currants or raisins, if used, want about a cup by modern practice, tossed in at the end.
Barley was the everyday grain of Scotland and the north of England long after wheat took over the south, and boiling it soft with milk, eggs, sugar and spice is simply the old milk-pottage habit dressed up as a baked pudding. Pearl barley — hulled and polished, as against pot or Scotch barley, which keeps more of its bran — was a standard store-cupboard item in nineteenth-century professional kitchens, used for invalid broths and thickened soups as well as for sweets. What makes this page worth reading is the digression that follows it: the author complains that puddings keep dragging him across the water, because American cooks and eaters preferred to call almost anything a pie. His example, the Civil War "Lincoln pie" of hardtack, bacon fat, molasses and dried apples, is the sort of camp-kitchen improvisation that circulated by word of mouth and is recorded here as trade-press anecdote rather than documented history; treat the account of its bakery popularity as the writer's recollection.