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Manchester Pudding
902. A pint of new milk boiled, three ounces of bread crumbs stewed in the boiling milk, and the grated rind of a lemon, are to be sweetened to the taste with lump sugar; then add the yolks and whites of four eggs, and three ounces of butter melted. Line a dish with a puff-paste, cover the bottom with preserve or marmalade, pour the pudding into it, and one hour will bake it. 903. Take a stewpan, and oil two ounces of butter; blanch twelve bitter and twelve sweet almonds, pound them in a mortar; take four ounces of powdered loaf sugar, the yolks of four eggs well beaten, the rind of a large lemon grated, and the juice. Put all these ingredients into the butter in the stewpan, and stir constantly till quite hot. Then put it into a dish lined with pastry, and bake it half an hour. Beat the whites of the eggs till perfectly stiff, put them upon the top of the pudding, and put it in the oven till it is set, and is of a lightbrown colour.
Two separate puddings sit side by side in this entry: the Manchester pudding proper (902), a breadcrumb custard over jam in a pastry case, and a second lemon-almond pudding (903) whose almond mixture cannot be reproduced today.
- The bitter almondsThe second pudding calls for twelve bitter almonds. Bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are crushed and moistened, and their sale as food is restricted in Britain and prohibited unless processed in the United States; they are not generally available. Use a current recipe if you want a lemon-almond pudding.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A breadcrumb custard in a puff-paste case wants a moderate oven, about 350F/180C, for the hour specified — hot enough to set the pastry, gentle enough that the custard does not curdle or weep.
- New milk"New milk" means fresh whole milk, unskimmed and not previously boiled. Whole milk is the right substitute; the boiling appears to be there to swell the crumbs rather than to sterilise.
- Lump sugarLump or loaf sugar was refined sugar broken from a cone-shaped loaf. Ordinary granulated sugar is the equivalent. Sweeten the hot crumb mixture to taste before the eggs go in — the recipe gives no quantity; 2 to 3 oz to a pint of milk is one reasonable starting point.
- Crumbs and proportionsThree ounces of dry breadcrumbs to a pint of milk gives a soft, spoonable custard rather than a firm slice. Let the crumbs stand in the hot milk until they have fully absorbed it before adding eggs, or the pudding sets in layers.
- Butter and eggsThree ounces of melted butter is generous by modern standards and will taste rich; cool the crumb mixture to lukewarm before beating in the four whole eggs so they do not scramble.
- Pastry caseA blind-baked puff-paste shell holds up better than a raw one under a wet filling. Spread the jam or marmalade thinly — a heavy layer boils up through the custard.
- YieldThe quantities would fill a shallow dish of roughly 8 to 9 inches and serve about six, though the recipe specifies neither. It is best warm rather than hot, when the custard has firmed enough to cut.
Manchester pudding belongs to the large nineteenth-century family of English bread-and-butter and breadcrumb puddings, in which stale bread, milk, eggs and a layer of preserve were turned into something fit for a dinner table. It is close kin to Queen of Puddings, which shares the crumb-and-jam base but takes a meringue lid; here the whites are simply beaten in with the yolks, so the pudding is plainer and denser. The name is generally taken as a regional label of the same sort as Bakewell or Sussex pond pudding rather than the record of a particular cook or kitchen, and it recurs across Victorian household books with small variations in the amount of butter and the choice of preserve. Its presence in a general British cookery collection reflects how thoroughly such puddings had become standard middle-class fare in the Victorian period: cheap in materials, forgiving in method, and dressed up by a rim of puff pastry and a spoonful of marmalade.