Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › English Fruit Pudding
English Fruit Pudding
Mrs. H. S. Bristol.
One pound currants, one pound stoned raisins, one pound sugar, one pound suet, two pounds of grated or soaked bread, six eggs, one-half teaspoon saleratus, one teaspoon salt, and one grated nutmeg ; crumb the soft part of the bread fine; soak the crust with boiling milk, or water will do ; beat up the eggs and put all together, mixing thoroughly with the hands; take a square piece of cotton cloth and lay it in a tin pan, put the pudding into the cloth and tie down close; put into a pot of boiling water, and boil five hours ; as the water boils away, keep adding more.
A full-sized Victorian boiled pudding: about seven pounds of batter, cooked five hours in a cloth. Nothing here is dangerous, but almost every step assumes equipment and habits that have fallen away.
- The cloth is the hingeScald the cotton cloth in boiling water, wring it out, then dust the inside generously with flour before filling. The wet flour sets into a skin that keeps water out; a dry, unfloured cloth lets the pudding waterlog at the edges. Tie tightly but leave an inch of slack, since the pudding swells.
- SaleratusSaleratus is essentially baking soda; the name covered potassium bicarbonate in earlier use and sodium bicarbonate by the later nineteenth century. With no acid in the mixture it does very little leavening and half a teaspoon in seven pounds of batter is close to nothing; you may leave it out without changing the result.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, shredded or grated fine — a butcher will usually supply it on request. Packaged shredded suet sold for baking works as well. Frozen suet grates far more easily than fresh.
- The breadTwo pounds is the weight of about two large stale loaves. Crumb the soft interior, and pour just enough boiling milk over the crusts to soften them, then squeeze out the excess — the mixture should be stiff enough to hold together when pressed, not sloppy.
- Keep the pot at a boilSet a plate or trivet in the bottom of the pot so the cloth cannot scorch against the metal, and top up only with boiling water. Cold water dropped into the pot stalls the cooking and can make the pudding heavy.
- NutmegOne whole nutmeg grated is roughly two to three teaspoons of ground, depending on its size — assertive by modern standards but correct for the style. Grate it fresh; pre-ground has lost most of its oils.
- YieldThis makes a single pudding serving fifteen to twenty. Halve or quarter it comfortably, adjusting the boiling to about three hours for half the quantity. Serve hot with hard sauce, a lemon sauce, or cream.
- Keeping and reheatingA pudding this rich keeps a week or more refrigerated in its cloth, and reheats by steaming or boiling for an hour. Sliced leftovers fry well in butter.
Boiled puddings in a cloth were the standard English sweet before tins and reliable ovens were common, and this one leans on two pounds of stale bread, crusts included, softened with boiling milk. Suet gives the richness that butter would in a baked cake, and because it melts slowly it holds the crumb open through five hours of steady boiling. The cloth-and-pot method meant a household with only a stove top, or a single fire, could still turn out a substantial dessert. The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from contributions by named local women and sold to benefit a charitable home, which is why the recipes carry attributions like Mrs. H. S. Bristol's and why so many of them are scaled for a large family or a church supper rather than for four.