17^th century

Sussex Pond Pudding

The Sussex pond pudding is still popular in Britain today. It is basically the same as the Kentish well pudding, which appears later in cookery books. The two counties share a border so it would make sense for the pudding to be popular in Kent too; however its current appearance is somewhat different from the original. Not only would this pudding have been boiled in intestine casings and later in cloth, but it had never enclosed a whole lemon until quite recently when Jane Grigson published a recipe for it in her book English Food (1974).

In the seventeenth century, and perhaps even earlier, this pudding was made with only a lump of butter hidden in the middle; the butter sauce running out of the pudding when it was cut would create the ‘pond’ that gave the pudding its name.

The oldest recipe for a Sussex pond pudding can be found in The Queen-like Closet, a book by Hannah Wolley, published in 1672. She calls it just a Sussex pudding. She suggests to stuff apples or gooseberries in the pudding but doesn’t mention a lemon:

Take a little cold cream, butter and flower, with some beaten spice, eggs, and a little salt. Make them into a stiff paste, then make them into a round ball, and you mold it, put in a piece of butter in the middle; and so tye it hard up in a buttered cloth, and put it into boiling water, and let it boil apace till it be enough then serve it in, and garnish your dish with barberries; when it is at the table cut it open at the top, and there will be as it were a pound [pond] of butter, then put rosewater and sugar into it and so eat it. In some of this like paste you may wrap great apples, being pared whole, in one piece of thin paste, and so close it round the apple, and through them into boiling water, and let them boil till enough, you may also put some green gooseberries into some, and when wither of these are boiled, cut them open and put in rosewater butter and sugar.

Hannah Wolley, The Queen-like Closet, 1672

A century later, William Ellis, author of several books on husbandry and brewing tells us in his book The Country Housewife’s Family Companion that on 13 June 1749 ‘Baitin at the Castle Inn at East-Grinstead’ he watched the cook-maid prepare a Sussex pond pudding and noted the recipe. We have Ellis’s observations to thank for many clues to life in eighteenth century England. In this particular case he tells us how the pudding, which he referred to as ‘famous’, was eaten: ‘When boiled enough, they find the butter run to oil, and well soaked into the pudding, that they eat it with meat instead of bread, or without meat as a delicious pudding.’

The earliest recipe I could find for a Kentish well pudding dates back to Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery for Private Families from 1845. Her recipe is nearly identical in outcome to that of Wolley’s Sussex pudding, but she uses suet in her recipe, which has now become the standard.