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College Pudding
Three ounces bread crumbs, three ounces finely chopped beef kidney suet, two ounces thoroughly picked currants, half ounce finely chopped candied orange peel, two ounces fine sugar, half saltspoon grated nutmeg, two eggs and two tablespoons good brandy.
Place the bread crumbs in a basin, add all the other ingredients and briskly stir with a wooden spoon until thoroughly mixed. Lightly butter six individual pudding moulds. Fill them with the mixture, place in a tin, pour in hot water up to half their height and set in the oven to steam for twenty-five minutes. Remove, unmould on a hot dish, pour a claret Sabayon sauce over them and serve as hot as possible.
A small steamed suet pudding, baked in a water bath rather than boiled in a cloth. The quantities are modest and precise, and the method is straightforward once the vessels and the sauce are sorted out.
- Set the oven at 350FSet the oven moderate -- the recipe gives no temperature. The pudding is steamed in a bain-marie, so the water does the cooking and the oven need only hold it near a simmer; something in the region of 325-350F will do, and much hotter will boil the water hard and dry the exposed tops.
- Cover the tinNothing in the original protects the surface, and 25 minutes of dry oven air will leave a skin on the tops. Lay buttered foil or a sheet of parchment loosely over the whole tin so the moulds steam rather than bake.
- The moulds"individual pudding moulds" here most likely means dariole moulds, of roughly 4 to 5 fl oz. Butter them well; the recipe says to fill them, but a little headroom is safer, as the eggs give some lift.
- Beef kidney suetFresh kidney suet from a butcher, chopped fine and free of membrane, is what is meant. Packaged shredded suet works and is already the right texture; vegetable suet gives a softer, less fragrant result. Chill it before chopping or it smears.
- Currants, not red currantsThese are dried Zante currants, small dried grapes, not the fresh berries. Two ounces is roughly a third of a cup; "thoroughly picked" means going through them for stems and grit, which is far less necessary with modern packaged fruit.
- A saltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so half of one is an eighth of a teaspoon of nutmeg. Grate it fresh; the whole flavour of the pudding leans on it and the brandy.
- The sauce is not in this recipeClaret sabayon is a zabaglione made with red wine in place of Marsala: egg yolks and sugar whisked over barely simmering water with claret until thick and foamy. It must be made at the last minute and served at once, as it collapses on standing.
- Yield and timingSix small puddings, which is a dessert for six after a substantial meal or four generous portions. Test with a skewer at 25 minutes; the centre should be set but still moist, and they turn out cleanly after a minute's rest.
College puddings are among the oldest named English boiled puddings, generally traced to the Oxford and Cambridge colleges of the seventeenth century, where they took the form of a small suet pudding of crumbs, dried fruit and spice; the closely related New College pudding is usually fried or baked rather than steamed. By the time this version appears, the dish turns up dressed in restaurant clothes: individual moulds, a bain-marie in the oven instead of a copper of boiling water, and a claret sabayon. The use of breadcrumbs rather than flour marks it as belonging to the earlier tradition of English puddings, in which stale bread was the structural ingredient and suet supplied both fat and richness.