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Hasty Pudding
839. Boil a pint of milk, then whilst boiling stir into it as much flour as will thicken it, generally about a table-spoonful. Serve hot, with cold butter and sugar, or, if preferred, the best treacle. 840. HASTY PUDDING BAKED.-Stir half a pound of flour into a pint of cold milk, and boil it, then take five eggs, and three quarters of an ounce of bitter almonds blanched and pounded, and add them to the hasty pudding when cold. Sweeten with sugar. Bake in cups, and serve with wine sauce.
Two puddings sit under one heading here: a plain stirred milk-and-flour pudding, and a baked version enriched with eggs and bitter almonds. The second cannot be made as printed.
- Bitter almonds are the problemThree quarters of an ounce of blanched, pounded bitter almonds is roughly 20 g of nut used raw in a custard that is only briefly baked. Bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted; Victorian cooks used them as a flavouring in tiny amounts and still poisoned people with them. They are not sold for eating in most countries now, and no quantity in this recipe is safe to reproduce. If you want that scent in a baked pudding, use a current recipe built on almond extract.
- TreacleIn a British book of this date "the best treacle" means dark cane syrup — golden syrup or light molasses is the nearest thing on a modern shelf. Blackstrap is far too bitter for the purpose.
- A tablespoon of flour is not a mistakeHasty pudding of the first sort is deliberately loose, closer to a thick pouring sauce than a set pudding. If you want it stiff enough to hold a spoon, expect to use two or three tablespoons per pint, added as a slurry in cold milk so it does not lump.
- PintA British pint is 20 fl oz, about 570 ml, not the American 16 oz. The half pound of flour in the second recipe is 225 g.
- Cold butter and sugarThe butter is most likely intended as a cold lump dropped on so that it melts into the hot pudding at the table; the recipe says only 'cold butter and sugar', but that contrast is worth keeping.
- Wine sauceThe sauce called for with the baked version is a period sweet sauce of butter, sugar and sherry or Madeira, thinned and served warm. It appears elsewhere in books of this era and is assumed knowledge here rather than explained.
- YieldA pint of milk thickened with flour serves two to three as a hot pudding. Neither entry gives a number.
Hasty pudding earned its name honestly: flour or meal stirred into boiling liquid was the fastest hot sweet a kitchen could produce, needing no oven, no eggs and no waiting. In Britain the flour version was old enough by the mid-nineteenth century to be nursery food and invalid food as much as dinner, while in North America the same name attached to a cornmeal mush, which is why the phrase reads quite differently on either side of the Atlantic. The baked entry that follows shows the standard Victorian move of promoting a plain dish upmarket — eggs, sugar, a flavouring almond and a wine sauce turn a two-ingredient pudding into something fit for individual cups at a company table. It also shows how casually bitter almonds were handled in domestic cookery of the period.