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Apricot Pudding
Take the desired quantity of apricots, divide them and remove the stones. Place the halves in a stewpan over a stove with a little sugar. Pour over a little water and shake well, and when about half-cooked, pour them into a pudding-basin which has been previously buttered and lined with a good suet paste. Cover the top with some of the paste, tie over with a pudding-cloth, plunge into boiling water, and boil for two hours. Remove from the saucepan, untie the cloth, turn out on a dish, and serve.
A boiled suet pudding of the plainest English kind, set down in shorthand for cooks who already knew how to make suet paste and line a basin. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- Quantity, since none is givenA 1.5-quart pudding basin takes about 2 lb of fresh apricots, halved, with 1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar depending on ripeness. That serves six.
- Suet pasteA common proportion is 8 oz flour to 4 oz shredded beef suet, a pinch of salt, and just enough cold water to bind — roughly 5 to 6 fl oz; many late-nineteenth-century versions also add a teaspoon of baking powder. Vegetable suet can be substituted; butter is less suitable, as it tends to melt out during the long boil.
- "About half-cooked" is the hingeThe fruit finishes in the basin over two hours. Stew it only until the halves soften at the edges and release juice, four or five minutes, or the finished pudding will be apricot soup inside a crust.
- Very little waterTwo or three tablespoons in the stewpan is enough. Apricots give up a great deal of liquid, and an over-wet filling will soak through the paste and burst the pudding when you turn it out.
- Covering the basinA floured pudding-cloth tied under the rim is the original method. A pleated round of buttered parchment under pleated foil, tied with string and given a string handle, is easier to lift and seals just as well.
- BoilingThe water should come halfway to two-thirds up the basin, not over the top, and must be kept at a steady boil for the full two hours. Top up from a kettle of boiling water so the temperature never drops.
- Discard the stonesApricot kernels contain amygdalin and are not a substitute for almond flavouring, whatever older books occasionally suggest. Throw the stones away.
- Turning outLet the pudding stand five minutes off the heat before inverting; the paste firms slightly and holds its shape. Serve with pouring custard or cream.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) is largely a professional's compendium of the international restaurant repertoire, but stretches of it — this recipe among them — are straight English domestic cookery of the sort any hotel kitchen still had to produce on request. The boiled suet pudding, fruit sealed inside a paste and cooked in a cloth-tied basin, was the workhorse sweet of nineteenth-century Britain and its exported kitchens: it needed no oven, only a pot of water, and the suet crust set firm enough to be turned out whole. California apricots were reaching New York by the 1890s, chiefly dried, though how much fresh fruit made the journey is less clear; that growing availability is presumably why a fruit that would once have been a luxury appears here with no more ceremony than "the desired quantity." The terse, assumption-heavy phrasing is characteristic of the book — it was written for people who could already make suet paste and needed only to be told what to put in it.