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Biscuit Pudding
Place five or six large broken biscuits in a saucepan with a breakfast cupful of milk, the grated rind of half a lemon, and boil well. Working this mixture into a smooth paste, add three ounces of warmed butter, two ounces of finely-crushed loaf-sugar and a tablespoonful of brandy, together with four well-beaten eggs; pour this mixture into a buttered dish or basin, tie over with a cloth, and place in a saucepan of water, and boil it for twenty minutes. When done, turn out onto a dish, pour over a little wine sauce, and serve.
A steamed pudding built on broken biscuits rather than breadcrumbs or flour, thickened almost entirely by eggs. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how a basin pudding behaves, so a few points need filling in.
- "Biscuits" means cookiesIn this period a biscuit in a pudding is a dry sweet one — Marie, arrowroot, tea biscuit, or a plain sponge finger. Five or six large ones is roughly 4 to 5 ounces. American soda biscuits would give you something quite different and savoury.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup: reckon 8 to 10 fluid ounces, so about a cup to a cup and a quarter of milk.
- Loaf sugarSugar was sold as a hard cone or block to be nipped and crushed at home. Two ounces of granulated or superfine sugar, about a scant third of a cup, is the equivalent.
- Boil the milk mixture, then cool itThe soaked biscuits should come down below scalding before the four beaten eggs go in, or they may scramble and the pudding will be grainy rather than set smooth. The butter the recipe calls for is warmed, so it will not cool the paste; let it stand a few minutes before the eggs go in.
- Twenty minutes is shortAn egg-rich mixture of this size in a covered basin will not set through in twenty minutes unless the basin is shallow and wide. Expect 45 minutes to an hour for a standard 1-quart pudding basin, and test with a skewer: it should come out clean and the centre should feel firm, not liquid.
- Covering the basinThe cloth tied over the top keeps condensation off. Buttered parchment under foil, pleated to allow rise and tied at the rim, does the same job and is easier to handle. Keep the water at a bare simmer partway up the basin and top it up as it evaporates.
- Wine sauceThe book assumes you know it: a sweetened custard or a butter-sugar sauce loosened with sherry or Madeira. Any pouring custard with a spoonful of sweet wine stirred in will suit.
- YieldFour to six servings from a 1-quart basin. Turn it out while hot; left to cool in the basin it will stick.
Steamed and boiled basin puddings were the backbone of nineteenth-century English dessert cookery, and the biscuit version belongs to a whole family of thrift puddings — bread pudding, cabinet pudding, diplomat pudding — that existed to use up the dry ends of the store cupboard. The lemon rind, brandy and wine sauce are what lift it out of nursery territory; strip them away and the same formula is a household economy dish.