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Fig Pudding
Half pound figs, quarter pound grated bread, two and a half PUDDINGS AND SAU/CES. ounces powdered sugar, three ounces butter, two eggs, one tea-cup milk; chop figs fine and mix with butter, and by degrees add the other ingredients; butter and sprinkle a mold with bread-crumbs, pour in pudding, cover closely, and boil for three hours; serve with lemon sauce. - Florence Woods Hush.
A boiled bread pudding of the old school: no flour, no suet, the crumb and the butter doing all the work. The weights are English-style and easy to convert.
- The measurements in cups and gramsHalf pound figs is about 8 oz (225 g); quarter pound grated bread is 4 oz, roughly 2 cups of fresh crumbs loosely packed. Two and a half ounces sugar is about 1/3 cup, three ounces butter is 6 tablespoons, and a period tea-cup is usually reckoned at somewhere between two-thirds of a cup and a full cup of milk.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this era "powdered" means finely milled granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-laced confectioners' sugar sold today. Ordinary granulated or caster sugar is the right substitute.
- Grated breadThis is fresh crumb grated from a day-old loaf on a box grater, not dry packaged crumbs. Dried crumbs absorb far more liquid and will give a dense, sandy pudding; if that is all you have, add a few extra tablespoons of milk.
- The figsDried figs, stemmed and chopped fine. If your figs are hard and dry, a ten-minute soak in warm water or milk, well drained, brings them back.
- Butter firstThe recipe has you chop the figs and mix them with the butter before adding anything else; coating the fruit in fat may help keep it from sinking or clumping when the crumbs and liquid go in. Have the butter properly soft, not melted.
- "Boil" means steam"Boil" -- In period puddings this could mean either immersing the closed mold in boiling water or standing it in a water bath. The gentler modern route: the covered mold sits in a pan of simmering water reaching halfway to two-thirds up its side, lid on the pan, water kept at a bare simmer and topped up with boiling water as it drops. A rolling boil will rock the mold and drive water under the cover.
- Covering the moldIf your mold has no clamped lid, use buttered parchment and foil pleated across the middle to allow for rise, tied down with string. Without a tight seal the pudding takes on water and turns sodden.
- Three hoursThat suits a quart mold. In smaller individual molds, 60 to 75 minutes should be enough. The pudding is done when a skewer comes out clean and the top springs back.
- Yield and servingFills roughly a one-quart mold and serves six to eight. Rest it five to ten minutes before turning out or it may collapse. Period lemon sauces are generally sugar, butter and boiling water thickened with a little flour or cornstarch, finished with lemon juice and zest.
Boiled puddings built on grated bread rather than flour were the everyday alternative to plum pudding in Anglo-American kitchens, and a sensible use for stale loaf ends in a household that baked its own. Figs reached the American South as a dried import in barrels and boxes, and were also grown in home gardens along the Gulf Coast, so a fig pudding sat somewhere between festive and ordinary. The Dixie Cook-Book, like most subscription-style compilations of the 1880s, gathered its contents from named contributors, and Florence Woods Hush's attribution here is typical. The absence of suet is worth noting, marking this as a lighter, more genteel pudding than the traditional English Christmas kind, closer to what later cooks would call a steamed dessert.