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Eve's Pudding
If you want a good pudding, mind what you are taught; Take eggs six in number, when bought for a groat; The fruit with which Eve her husband did cozen, Well pared, and well chopped, at least half a dozen ; Six ounces of bread, let Moll eat the crust, And crumble the rest as fine as the dust; Six ounces of currants, from the stem you must sort, Lest you break out your teeth, and spoil all the sport; Six ounces of sugar won't make it too sweet, Some salt and some nutmeg will make it complete; Three hours let it boil without any flutter, But Adam won't like it without wine and butter.
A verse recipe, meant to be memorised rather than consulted: six eggs, six apples, and six ounces each of breadcrumbs, currants and sugar, boiled in a cloth or basin. Translated into plain terms it is a steamed apple pudding bound with egg rather than suet.
- Reading the riddle"The fruit with which Eve her husband did cozen" is apples; "at least half a dozen" means six or more, pared and chopped small. A groat was fourpence, so the line about eggs points at their price as well as their number.
- The proportionsSix eggs, at least six apples, 6 oz breadcrumbs, 6 oz currants, 6 oz sugar. Six ounces of soft crumbs is roughly 3 cups, loosely packed; 6 oz of currants is a little over a cup; 6 oz sugar is a scant cup.
- Bread"Let Moll eat the crust" means use only the soft interior of a stale loaf, grated or rubbed fine. Fresh bread pastes rather than crumbles, and packaged dry breadcrumbs are far too hard and fine; day-old white bread whizzed briefly in a processor is the equivalent.
- CurrantsDried currants, not fresh redcurrants. Modern packets are already destemmed, but they still repay a quick check and a rinse; the warning about teeth was not rhetorical in an age of hand-cleaned fruit.
- No suetThere is no suet or flour in the verse. The eggs and apple do all the binding, which makes the result closer to a dense baked custard studded with fruit than to a plum pudding.
- "Without any flutter"This is the hinge. The water must stay at a bare, steady simmer for the full three hours, never a rolling boil, or the egg mixture curdles and weeps. Butter a pudding basin well, cover it with pleated parchment and foil tied under the rim, stand it on a trivet or folded cloth in the pot, and top up with boiling water as it falls.
- Seasoning"Some salt and some nutmeg" is left to the cook: a scant half teaspoon of salt and about a teaspoon of grated nutmeg, roughly half a whole nut, suits the quantity.
- Wine and butterThe closing line points to a butter-and-wine sauce of the kind common at the period: butter creamed with sugar and sherry or Madeira, served melting over the hot pudding.
- YieldThe mixture needs a basin of at least two quarts; it serves eight or so. Let it stand five minutes before turning out.
Rhyming recipes were a fixture of English domestic printing from the late eighteenth century onward, written to be learned by heart by cooks who might read slowly or not at all, and Eve's Pudding is among them; versions of these lines turn up in English and American household books throughout the nineteenth century, usually with the wording only lightly shuffled. The name is a straightforward pun on the apple, and the verse leans on it hard, dragging in Adam at the close to ask for the wine sauce. That a nineteenth-century compilation still prints the poem rather than a set of plain instructions says something about how such books worked: they gathered what contributors already knew by heart, and a rhyme that had long been in circulation counted as a recipe every bit as much as a measured one. The dish itself belongs to the long family of boiled and steamed puddings that dominated British dessert before reliable domestic ovens.