CHAPTER 2

BAKED PUDDINGS

Baked puddings

Although John Murrell, in his early seventeenth century tome A Newe Booke of Cookerie, gives a recipe ‘To make a Pudding in a Frying-panne’, and mentions that his ‘A Fierced Pudding’ can either be boiled or baked, it would take a while before people would actually start baking proper puddings in the oven. Pastry ovens were constructed in a few important kitchens in the early sixteenth century but they would be used solely for more delicate pastry. Florentines and other tarts were often made into elaborate shapes, resembling a stained-glass window, and beautifully decorated with elaborately cut pastry covers, an ancestor of the lattice tart top. They could be made as part of the tart, but often were made separately to act as a beautifully crafted lid that could be taken off before serving, and sometimes reused for another tart.

I believe that as Robert May gives designs for each of these tarts or pies in his book, The Accomplisht Cook (1660), dinner guests would know by looking at the design of the tart which filling it enclosed. These ‘Cut–Laid’ covers, as they were called, appear in one of my favourite still-life paintings, painted by Clara Peeters from my hometown of Antwerp in 1611. Recipes for these covers, however, are exclusively found in English cookery texts. Historian Ivan Day has discovered that it would not be until the eighteenth century that these kind of recipes appeared outside of England; in Austria in Conrad Hagger’s Neues Saltzburgisches Kochbuch in 1719.

How were puddings baked if ovens were only available to the elite households? Earthenware dishes or cast-iron skillets containing a pudding mixture could be placed close by the fire or in the embers to bake. Cast-iron pots could be used as ovens when placed on the embers or by the fire, much like a Dutch oven, and were often also covered in embers. When the peasants wanted to bake a more delicate pie, they had to go to the baker’s oven, where it would be baked along with the pies of other people from the village. This communal baking is something that is seen all over Europe.

Tray-baked black pudding was made in England when animals were bled and guts weren’t available. Blood was also made into small cakes and baked on a griddle iron. This shows that people were constantly looking for ways to prepare puddings without the need for animal intestines as a vessel, or even a pudding bag or cloth. But pastry was time consuming and called for a skilful hand, so it made sense that earthenware dishes were produced to be used instead of pastry. Some of these even mimicked the look of a pastry casing, featuring the same pinched rims. The pie dishes we know today are descendants of those early earthenware pie dishes.

Another popular vessel to make baked puddings in was the pie plate. These plates were made of silver or pewter and appeared in various sizes. A Bakewell-style pudding, for example, is traditionally baked on a plate, as were many similar puddings and pies before it. The vessel that ought to be used was not usually specified in ancient recipes. One was supposed to know that one type of pudding was made in a plate, a fruit tart or florentine was made in a shortcrust or paste-royal casing, and the large variety of ancient custard tarts were made with a hot water pastry. The chef was supposed to know, and the recipes weren’t meant as clear instructions.

It is only at the very beginning of the 1700s that recipes for baked puddings start to appear along with the boiled version in cookery books. And even then most households would not have been able to bake them as the kitchen range only came into use by the general public by the end of the nineteenth century.

As soon as kitchen ranges were introduced into many homes, more baked pudding recipes appeared as people began to experiment. Dumplings, previously boiled, would now also be baked, which explains two postcards I found from around 1910, depicting a ‘Devonshire Dumpling’ which was clearly baked rather than boiled, with a pastry more like a puff pastry or shortcrust pastry instead of the more stodgy suet and bread dough it was made with before.

Soon the technique for steaming a pudding in the oven became popular and so most of the boiled puddings were prepared in a pudding mould, which would allow the cook to create various shaped puddings. In Victorian cookery books, pictures of shaped plum puddings appeared and decorative moulds became extremely popular. One mould could be used for a baked pudding, a jelly or an ice cream; they were expensive and therefore people would have wanted to use them as much as they could. Even teacups were used for baking small puddings.

It seems to me that a baked pudding always added an extra bit of festivity to a meal, as it wasn’t as straightforward to cook as a boiled pudding. Far more things can go wrong with baking a pudding than with boiling, so it also called for a more skilled cook. That cook was also often expected to create lavishly decorated versions of baked puddings or tarts. Flour used for pastry had to be finely milled and was therefore expensive, so I believe that puddings and tarts in a pastry casing would have been the privilege of the upper class rather than the peasant home.

Puddings made with breadcrumbs tell us that either there was surplus bread that wasn’t eaten or there was enough bread to use fresh breadcrumbs, meaning that these kitchens had plenty of food. In the peasant home you would probably have to scrape the crumbs from the table and floor to be able to find a scrap of bread that wasn’t eaten. And I am sure the mother of the house would have beaten you to it and already collected the crumbs to keep in a jar for pudding or thickening soup.

We can also not forget that the bread of the peasantry wasn’t as refined as the white manchet bread that the rich had been eating for centuries. It was gritty and dark, and you could break your teeth on it. Hardly a good base for a delightful pudding. Bread puddings would often be baked, although not all bread puddings are baked puddings; that is why those puddings that have bread as their main Ingredient, such as bread-and-butter pudding, are in a separate chapter in this book.

It is safe to say that baked puddings have graced the elite dinner table for far longer than the tables of the humble working class. But I believe that inventive cooks, however poor they were, would always have tried to bake them. Recipes for these poor man’s baked puddings are virtually unknown, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t put by the fire, or in a communal oven somewhere at some time.