CHAPTER 1

BOILED & STEAMED

Boiled & steamed

Boiled puddings are the first and true puddings in the world. They come from the necessity and logic of using up every bit of an animal, meaning the blood, the offal and the guts. The ancestors of all puddings are the sausage-type stuffed guts of Ancient Greece and Rome. It is nearly impossible to know whether stuffed guts were eaten in England before the Roman pudding-eaters extraordinaire arrived. I just think it is probable and logical that they would have been, in order to eat from nose to tail.

Boiling a pudding made it possible to cook something along with whatever else was stewing in the pot. Households only had one cauldron in which they had to prepare everything over an open fire. Because these puddings would only be prepared when guts were available, they probably gained status as a special treat. The amount of care and preparation put into the puddings would most definitely have made a pudding the best meal a peasant could afford.

Pudding in your puddings
As mentioned in the introduction, in old texts the word ‘pudding’ also refers to the intestines of a man or animal. This could very well be the reason why puddings are named as such, as the earliest ones were prepared in intestines. Game animals, larger birds and fish were often prepared with a pudding – meaning a stuffing – ‘cooked in their belly’. Stuffing for eggs, vegetables and roots were all also referred to as puddings in A Book of Cookrye in 1584.

The pudding cloth

When people wanted to have their favourite puddings and sausages more often, they searched for an alternative vessel to cook them in. Until recently, historians believed that the first mention of a pudding cloth appeared in Gervase Markham’s oatmeal section of his fabulous book The English Huswife in 1615. However, it has come to light, in one of the last works of historian Constance Hieatt, that there was an earlier mention in A Miscellany of Household Information, which was compiled more than a hundred years earlier, in 1485. The recipe is fora boiled fish pudding for Lent, and uses cod, salmon, currants, salt and saffron.

The pudding cloth is one of the first evolutions of the boiled pudding; it was made from tightly woven linen and was reused each time a pudding was made. The cloth would have made it easier to prepare puddings and would allow for more recipes to be developed. The shortage of nutrition in the winter months when people had no meat left would also have meant that people with cattle often bled the already weak animals to bake the blood, mixed with cereal, into cakes for a much-needed hearty meal (see Black pudding in a tray and griddle cakes).

The need for an easier method would develop puddings even more in later centuries. In the early years of the seventeenth century, a ‘Pudding Pye’ appears in Gervase Markham’s book, published alongside the tarts and pies. He also gives a recipe for a ‘White-pot’, which was prepared in a pot, pan or dish. From then on, other baked puddings appear and the term ‘puddings’ is stretched to include pies and tarts, as well as custards. Of course, this evolution could only be noticed in the most lavish of households. The plain folk would have been happy if they had a small fire and a pot while the rich had ovens built into the heart of their kitchens.

By 1690 the words of a French visitor tell us that puddings are baked in the oven, boiled with meat and made in fifty different ways. Some puddings continued to be boiled throughout history; the plum pudding, suet puddings and haggis are great examples. In fact, haggis has changed little – it is still boiled in either a sheep’s stomach lining or another large intestine such as ox bung – while the plum pudding lost its animal-derived casing and was prepared in a cloth, and later in a pudding basin (mould) when that method became the fashion.

One-pot meals

Plum puddings, plain suet puddings or dumplings were prepared alongside and sometimes even cooked in the pot with the meat or pottage, to act as a filler before or during the meal. People I have spoken to in England can still recall being presented roast or stewed beef with plum pudding or plain suet pudding in the mid-twentieth century. In Hungary and the Czech Republic the dumpling is a necessary part of a goulash, where the pudding is cut into slices and placed in a deep dish with the meat to soak up the bright red brothy paprika sauce.

When moulds started to be produced in the eighteenth century, people used them not only for moulded jellies but also for making cakes and boiling – and later steaming – puddings. By the nineteenth century, moulds were being produced on a larger scale and most books suggest using a mould, lined with a floured cloth or with the cloth wrapped around the basin.

Wartime shortages and shortcuts

The First and Second World Wars meant that the key ingredients for puddings were all rationed, with sugar and butter rationing continuing until 1953. This was a blow to pudding-making, but as they were so much a part of British culture the Ministry of Food issued several recipes using potato and other replacements in their leaflets to aid housewives to cook on war rations. After the war, many domestic servants didn’t return to their positions in the households where they previously worked. More and more, the ladies of the house had to do their own cooking, so a more simplified way of pudding-making was desired. Shortcuts were invented, such as Bird’s iconic custard powder.

When baking paper appeared, the need for a pudding cloth was no more; it remained in use only in the kitchens of nostalgic cooks. New and more reliable electric and gas ovens made the life of the cook even easier, and pudding-making with it.

Puddings were a little forgotten about in the early twentieth century, but they then became the staple of the school-dinner menu. Those who grew up on these puds re-created them at home and in their restaurants out of nostalgia. Steamed puddings saw a revival by the end of the twentieth century. They are simply good and, when prepared with care, they can be excellent.

I dare you to give boiled puddings a go. You won’t look back after you’ve tasted a boozy, rich plum pudding and experienced the delights of a nicely soaked suet dumpling.

Steaming a pudding using a pudding basin

Preparing the basin

Generously grease the pudding basin (mould) with butter and cut a circle of baking paper the same size as the base of the pudding basin. Place the paper circle in the basin; it will stick perfectly to the butter. This will make it easier to get the pudding out of the basin.

Spoon the batter into the pudding basin, then cut another two circles of baking paper with a diameter about 8–10 cm (3¼–4 inches) larger than the top of the basin. Make a narrow fold across the middle to leave room for the paper cover to expand slightly. I like to use two layers of paper. Tie securely around the top of the basin with kitchen string, then cover with foil and tie kitchen string to create a handle so it will be easier to lift the basin out of the pan after steaming.

Now get yourself a pan large enough to hold your pudding basin(s) or, if you are steaming little ones all in one go, a large baking dish. I prefer to use the oven for this as I do not like to have a pot of boiling hot water on the stovetop for 2 hours or more, depending on the recipe.

Preheat the oven to 160°C (315°F) or the temperature suggested in the recipe.

Stand the pudding basin on an inverted heatproof saucer, a jam-jar lid or trivet in the base of a deep ovenproof saucepan or pot.

Pour in boiling water to come halfway up the side of the basin. Cover the pan, either with its own lid or with foil, in order to trap the steam. Place in the preheated oven and leave for as long as your recipe states. This can be between 30 minutes and 7 hours depending on the size of your pudding.

When you are steaming little puddings, it is sufficient to place the puddings in a deep baking dish and fill the dish with boiling water once you have put them in the oven. Cover the dish with foil and steam for as long as your recipe states.

Unmoulding a pudding

Carefully remove the pudding from the pot while it is still in the oven. Have a tea towel (dish towel) at the ready to hold it safely and catch all the hot water that will drip from it. Leave the pudding to rest for a couple of minutes, so that it will cool off a bit and be easier to handle.

Have a plate ready. Remove the foil and string, then open the paper lid and turn the pudding out by carefully loosening it around the edges with a blunt knife.