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Fig Pudding II
¼ lb. brown sugar ¼ lb. bread crumbs 1/4 cup milk 2 eggs 3 oz. flour 1 large sour apple (cored, pared, and chopped) Cream the suet, and add figs, apple, and sugar. Pour milk over bread crumbs, and add yolks of eggs, well beaten; combine mixtures, add flour and whites of eggs beaten until stiff. Turn into buttered pudding mould, and steam four hours.
Serve with Lemon Sauce III.
English Plum Pudding I ⅓ lb. stale bread crumbs 1 cup scalded milk ¼ lb. sugar 4 eggs ½ lb. raisins, seeded, cut in pieces, and floured ¼ lb. currants ¼ lb. finely chopped figs 2 oz. finely cut citron 1/2 lb. suet 1/4 cup wine and brandy mixed 1½ grated nutmeg ¾ teaspoon cinnamon 1/3 teaspoon clove ½ teaspoon mace ½ teaspoons salt Soak bread crumbs in milk, let stand until cool, add sugar, beaten yolks of eggs, raisins, currants, figs, and citron; chop suet, and cream by using the hand; combine mixtures, then add wine, brandy, nutmeg, cinnamon, clove, mace, and whites of eggs beaten stiff. Turn into buttered mould, cover, and steam six hours. 6 ozs. flour
A steamed suet pudding of the old English type, lightened slightly by chopped apple and bound with bread crumbs rather than flour alone. The whole thing hinges on a steady, gentle steam for the full four hours — the pudding sets slowly and dries out or collapses if the water is allowed to boil hard or run dry.
- The quantitiesThe weights printed as "14 lb." are quarter-pounds: 4 oz brown sugar, 4 oz bread crumbs. The 3 oz flour is by weight — on the book's own reckoning of 4 cups of flour to the pound, about ¾ cup.
- Suet and figsThe method calls for suet and figs but the ingredient list as printed gives no amount for either. Comparable puddings of this era use about ¼ lb chopped suet and ¼ to ½ lb finely chopped dried figs; treat any figure as an estimate rather than the book's own.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold shredded in some butchers and supermarkets. It must be finely chopped or grated and worked ('creamed') with the hand or a spoon until soft before the fruit goes in. Frozen suet grates far more easily than fresh.
- Bread crumbsThese are soft crumbs from stale bread, not dry packaged crumbs. Four ounces is a generous two cups, loosely packed; dried crumbs will absorb far more milk and give a heavy pudding.
- The mouldA pudding basin or covered mould, well buttered and filled no more than two-thirds, so the pudding has room to rise. Cover with a lid, or with buttered parchment and foil tied down, to keep condensation out.
- SteamingSet the mould on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, cover, and keep at a bare simmer for four hours. Check the water every hour and top up with boiling water, never cold.
- The appleA large sour apple means a firm cooking variety — Bramley, Granny Smith, Northern Spy. A sweet dessert apple will collapse into the batter and flatten the flavour.
- ServingServes six to eight. Let the pudding stand five minutes before unmoulding. Lemon Sauce III is one of the lemon sauces given elsewhere in the book (it is not printed on this page); any sharp lemon or brandy sauce answers.
Steamed puddings bound with suet and bread crumbs descend from the English boiled pudding, which over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries increasingly moved from a cloth tied in a pot to a covered basin set in a steamer. Fannie Farmer's book gives a run of them — fig, date, plum and the like — and a pudding cooked over the stove in a pot of simmering water asked less of a household's oven than a baked dessert did. Dried figs, imported largely from Smyrna, were cheap and kept well, and appear throughout the book in puddings, fillings and confections. The sour apple looks like a practical addition rather than a decorative one: its acidity and moisture cut the richness of the suet.