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English Pudding
Have in a bowl two ounces granulated sugar, three whole raw eggs, two ounces sifted flour, one ounce dry cake or bread crumbs, half ounce candied lemon, one ounce picked currants, (To clean and prepare Sultana currants and raisins for pastry) half ounce chopped raw beef marrow, half ounce chopped citron, two tablespoons Jamaica rum, one teaspoon pounded allspice, one saltspoon salt and one gill cold milk. Mix all the ingredients with a wooden spoon until thoroughly amalgamated.
Lightly butter and flour six small moulds, then fill them up with the preparation. Place the moulds in a baking tin, fill up with boiling water to half the height of the moulds. Set in the oven for thirty-five minutes. Remove from the oven. Unmould on a hot dish; pour a brandy sauce over and serve hot.
A steamed-style pudding baked in a water bath rather than boiled in a cloth, so it comes out lighter than the Christmas kind. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the measures and one of the ingredients need translating.
- The water bath is the whole techniqueBoiling water to half the height of the moulds moderates the heat around the egg-rich batter so the puddings set gently rather than drying out at the edges. Top up with more boiling water if the tin runs dry before the time is up, and cover the tin loosely with foil if the tops are colouring too fast.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none, only 'set in the oven'. A moderate oven, around 350F/175C, suits the thirty-five minutes stated for moulds of about 4 to 5 fl oz; a skewer should come out clean and the pudding should shrink very slightly from the sides.
- A gill4 fl oz, about 120 ml, in American measure; in British measure a gill is 5 fl oz, so the quantity is not quite fixed. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon.
- Ounces are weights, not volumesTwo ounces of sugar is about 1/4 cup, two ounces of flour about 1/2 cup, one ounce of dry crumbs about 1/4 cup. Weighing gives a far more reliable result than converting.
- Beef marrowHalf an ounce of raw marrow, finely chopped, is doing the job suet does in a heavier pudding: it melts during baking and enriches the crumb. Ask a butcher for marrow bones and scoop the marrow out cold, or substitute an equal weight of shredded beef suet. Cold marrow chops far more cleanly than marrow at room temperature.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, the small black grapes, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. "Picked" means gone over by hand for stems and grit; commercially packed fruit today still repays a rinse and a thorough drying.
- Candied lemon and citronBoth are candied peel, sold in blocks or diced. Buy whole candied peel and chop it yourself if you can; the pre-diced supermarket mix is drier and more sugary than what the recipe assumes.
- Allspice"Pounded" simply means ground. A full teaspoon in a batter this small is assertive by modern taste; grinding whole berries fresh is worth the trouble here.
- Yield and the sauceSix individual puddings, one per person, best turned out and served within a few minutes of leaving the oven. The brandy sauce called for is the standard sweet one of the period: a thin custard or a butter-and-sugar sauce loosened with brandy, poured over rather than served alongside.
This is what a French-trained kitchen made of the English boiled-pudding tradition: the dried fruit, candied peel, spice and spirit are all there, but the suet is replaced by marrow, the cloth by small buttered moulds, and the long boil by thirty-five minutes in a bain-marie. The result is a plated dessert suited to restaurant service rather than a communal pudding brought to the table whole. Beef marrow appears as an enrichment in sweet dishes in professional cooking of the period and has largely dropped out of home baking since. The cross-reference to cleaning Sultana currants and raisins is a reminder that dried fruit then often arrived unwashed and gritty, and that preparing it was a real step in the work.