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Pudding, Ministeriel
Place in a basin four ounces chopped beef-kidney suet, four ounces granulated sugar, two ounces each well-picked currants and Smyrna raisins, one ounce chopped, candied apricots, one peeled and cored chopped apple, the chopped rind of a quarter of lemon, three eggs, two tablespoons rum, and mix well until thoroughly amalgamated. Lightly butter a heavy, damp cloth the size of a napkin, sprinkle a little flour over, pour preparation into centre of cloth, fold up the four ends and lightly tie pudding. Boil in plenty of water for one and a half hours, lift up, let stand for five minutes, untie, turn on a hot dish, pour rum sauce over and serve.
A boiled cloth pudding of the old hotel kitchens, rich in suet and dried fruit and set almost entirely by egg. It is short on instruction in a few places where it matters.
- The mixture has no flour or crumbsMany comparable boiled puddings of the period carry breadcrumbs or flour to bind the suet and eggs. As written this is suet, sugar, fruit and three eggs, which is likely to set softly and may weep in the cloth. If you want a pudding that turns out cleanly, add about 3 oz (85 g) fine dry breadcrumbs; expect a loose, almost custardy result without them.
- SuetFour ounces is about 115 g, roughly a packed cup of shredded beef suet. Butcher's kidney suet needs the membrane picked out and then chopping or grating while cold; packaged shredded suet (beef or vegetarian) substitutes directly by weight.
- Smyrna raisins and currantsSmyrna raisins are Turkish sultanas — use golden sultanas. Currants here means dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants. Two ounces of each is about 55 g, a scant half cup.
- Candied apricotsOne ounce (28 g) of candied apricot is still sold by confectioners and Middle Eastern grocers; candied peel or glacé pineapple stands in without changing the character much.
- The clothUse unbleached cotton or a plain linen tea towel, scalded, wrung out damp, buttered and dusted with flour so a skin forms against the batter. Tie with kitchen string and leave a little slack — the pudding swells. A well-buttered pudding basin covered with pleated parchment and foil does the same job with less drama.
- BoilingThe water must be at a rolling boil before the pudding goes in and must never stop boiling, or the pudding takes on water. Keep a kettle alongside to top up, and set a saucer or trivet in the bottom of the pot so the cloth does not scorch on the base. One and a half hours is right for this quantity.
- Turning outThe five-minute rest is not optional — it lets the surface firm so the cloth peels away instead of tearing the pudding. Untie, open the cloth flat, invert the hot dish over it and flip.
- Rum sauceNone is given. Common period options are a hard sauce (creamed butter and powdered sugar with rum beaten in) or a cooked sauce of egg yolks, sugar and cream flavoured with rum, poured hot.
- YieldSmall by modern pudding standards: the quantities suggest about four portions, five at a stretch, in keeping with a restaurant dessert course.
Filippini worked for decades at Delmonico's in New York, and his books are essentially a working catalogue of the international hotel repertoire as it stood around 1900 — French technique, German and Austrian sweets, English boiled puddings, all filed under grand-sounding names. Ministeriel is one of that class, though what the title was meant to convey is now unclear. The construction underneath is straightforwardly English — chopped kidney suet, dried vine fruit, an apple, lemon rind and spirit, boiled in a floured cloth — a method that predates pudding basins and was still standard in professional kitchens for a plum pudding or its lighter cousins. What appears to mark it as hotel work rather than household cooking is the scale: four ounces of suet for what seems to be a dessert course of four, when a domestic Christmas pudding of the same era was built by the pound and boiled for six or eight hours.