A Trip through Britain with Puddings, late 1800’s through early 1900’s, 1st Book: #22 Viennoise (Viennese) Pudding
#22 Viennoise (Viennese) Pudding
Highbridge, Somerset in the UK during 1898 through 1911
Required: – 5oz small cakes of bread, 3oz castor sugar, 3oz mixed peel, 3oz cherries or sultanas, 1 oz of loaf sugar, juice & rind of 1 lemon, 2 eggs, ¾ pint of milk, 1 glass of sherry
Mode: – The bread must be cut into small cubes like ordinary dice; take off all crust. Halve the cherries & stalk the sultanas chop the peel & grate the lemon rind. Mix all these in a basin with the castor sugar. Put the loaf sugar into a small clean pan without any water put in the fire & let it melt & color a rich brown but not black. Now let the sugar cool for several minutes. Pour in the milk. It will at first cause the sugar to set in a hard lump. That is quite right; merely stir it over the fire for a few minutes & as the milk becomes hot the sugar will remelt. Strain this colored milk onto the other ingredients in the basin & stir well. After about 10 minutes in order that the milk may cool beat up & add the eggs & wine. Mix thoroughly & let all soak for about ¼ of an hour. When ready pour the mixture in a well-greased mould. Twist a piece of buttered paper over the top. Strain for 2 ½ hours. Turn out & serve with sweet sauce.
Sultanas – Smaller size raisins, made from the white oval seedless grapes; in the U.S. it is the variety called Thompson Seedless, England is Lady de Coverly and in the middle East the Kishmish. They have been used for centuries and when you see raisins in an old recipe, they were probably referring to sultanas. The former Ottoman Empire used the round-fruited Kishmish to dry and make a larger sultana the modern Thompson variety makes a small, sweet golden colored raisin.
Candied Peel is not that bright red and green sticky stuff you see in the stores every holiday time. For these types of recipes, it is most likely candied lemon, orange and citron peel; or just candied citron peel. It is fairly easy to make and there are all kinds of recipes for them.
Castor Sugar – Also known as Baker’s Sugar: It is not very commonly used in the U.S. and may be very hard to find. Castor sugar is a superfine grain about halfway between your regular table sugar and powdered or confectioners’ sugar. It is used in England for cakes and cookies; you may be able to find it online, but the price may be prohibitive. You can make your own with a little work, by adding it to a blender and processing it to a finer granule, but be careful, if you go too far it will become powdered sugar which is too fine a grain. A suggestion on Bob’s Red Mill Website is to keep a towel over the top of the blender so the dust made in the process will not escape into the air and go everywhere.
It is the perfect sugar for meringues, as it is a finer grain so it blends better and make the meringue lighter and fluffier.
Loaf Sugar is refined sugar that has been formed into a cone or loaf shape, compacted tightly so you would have to snip bits off with specialized clippers (known as sugar nips) to get the amount of sugar needed for your recipe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugarloaf
This goes back into history the first recorded is in the 12th century but it could go much farther back, there is a reference to cone sugar in a 9th century Arabic book. If you want to play with some, look in the Hispanic section of your market, I have found small sugar cones called Piloncillo for sale in that area of the store. It is an unrefined brown sugar, so not quite the same as the refined white sugar usually used in the recipes mentioned in these books, but it will give you an idea of how to use it.
I really like unusual sounding recipes, especially those that have a sense of humor with them. These stuck out to me in this book from Highbridge, Somerset in the UK during 1898 through 1911. It is the first recipe in this book, “Old Lady Biscuits”, that just sets the whole thing as a fun read, with lots of interesting history and recipes.
Old Lady Biscuits recipe for sale in my ebay store
https://www.ebay.com/itm/254913192389?hash=item3b5a02a1c5:g:07wAAOSwFiZgWU6W
From this cookbook we get a trip around the United Kingdom through the pudding recipes. There are all kinds of them listed; 37 different puddings in this book; I will list the once a month so you can enjoy trying them one at a time. In England a “Pudding” is not always what we in the US would call a “Pudding”. Today if I say pudding, we think of things like the Jell-O pudding cups you can get in the store or the powdered stuff you can get in boxes. In Great Britain, it is often whatever is for dessert that day, in their media shows you will quite often hear someone asking “What is for Pudding today?” meaning what are they having for dessert.
But we also get the lovely and famous “Christmas Plumb Pudding”; that is only a small part in the family of “Puddings”. They go back into history, it would be difficult to pinpoint where they originally came from, the boiled pudding can be seen in all kinds of cook books going back to the Romans and all throughout the history of Great Britain and Europe.
Puddings can be sweet or savory and made from just about anything you can think of; meats, fruits, nuts, grains, spices and quite often they involve some sort of alcohol. Even the famous Scottish Traditional Dish of a Haggis, which is a blend of grains, oatmeal, organ meats and sometimes fruits, then cooked in the stomach of a sheep can be considered a “Pudding”.
All trough out the cookbooks I have from the 1800’s and the early 1900’s, there are pudding recipes of all kinds. I think they have become a forgotten food that today we consider an “Old-fashioned” something that Grandma made. Better left to the past, than try something that is actually a pretty good tasting food. Yes, they take a bit of preparation and cooking time, but we made one in the slow cooker last Christmas that was very easy, and we didn’t have to watch it the whole time it was boiling. It was very good and remarkably fun to make. You do not even have to use a pudding mold; (although I have a few of them as part of my collection of cooking utensils and tools) we used a simple glass bowl covered with foil and tied with a string to make a pudding in the crock pot. Online there are all kinds of instructions to use the crock pot as a tool in making them, just google “Crock pot Puddings” and they will come up.
There are several different handwriting types in this book, at least four of them. This book could have been handed down through several generations of a family, not many names are included and I will list them as they come up; I got it from someone in Highbridge, Somerset, this may not be where it originated so I cannot trace the names exactly to this area. There are only two dates that I have found in it; 1898 and 1911; so, it could date to the mid 1800’s and into the early 1900’s, there are two War cake recipes in it, which could put it into the 1940’s. The only full name in the book is Nancy Baines or Barnes.
There are no baking temperatures listed in these recipes; during this time, it was assumed you would know how to put together a recipe without directions and what temperature to cook or bake them at. You gauged your oven temps through experience of working in the kitchen next to your mother and other relatives throughout your childhood and youth. You learned methods, techniques and timing so you never needed to have it written down in the cook books or diaries passed through each generation of the family.
Oven temperatures are seldom given in the old books and recipes; most times the only say something like a slow oven or quick oven. These are the equlivent to today’s oven temperatures;
A very slow oven equals 250 to 275 degrees.
A slow oven equals 300 to 325 degrees.
A moderate oven equals 350 to 375 degrees.
A hot or quick oven equals 375 to 400 degrees.
A very hot oven equals 400 to 450 degrees.
Suet is going to be a common ingredient in these puddings, there is a difference between suet and lard; best to not substitute one for the other. Breadcrumbs are also a common ingredient, the pudding was a common way to use up old dry or stale bread; the phrase “Waste not, want not” was taken very seriously, food was expensive and none was wasted if at all possible. During the years of the World Wars, one and two, again food was expensive and rationed; you used everything you had and made due without things you could not get; such as butter, meat, eggs, sugar and others.
Suet – It is the hard, raw fat from beef or mutton found around the kidneys and loins. The high smoke point and fast melting temperature makes it perfect for deep frying and pastry making. After rendering into tallow, it is used in cooking and baking such things as the traditional English Christmas pudding. The long process of rendering it down to tallow, involves melting and simmering several times, cooling it down all to refine the suet to a usable state. Suet requires refrigeration if it to be stored for any length of time.
Do not confuse suet with all fat from the animals it can only be found around the heart and kidneys of cattle and sheep. Nor should it be confused with drippings, which is the melted fats in the pan when cooking the meat.
Pre-packaged suet that can be found today in the markets is mixed with flour and dehydrated to make it stable at room temperature. Some care is needed to use this for the old recipes, the proportions of flour to fat will alter the stated recipe. Fresh suet can be bought in markets and must be coarsely grated to use; then must be refrigerated prior to use and used within a few days of buying it.
Lard – Is a semi-solid white fat from pigs used as a cooking fat or a shortening. It is prized for its properties of making pastries light and flaky, replacing butter in the recipes. The leaf lard is from the “flare” visceral fat surrounding the kidneys and inside the loin. With very little pork flavor it is perfect for use in baked goods; and since the early 1990 when trans-fats in partially hydrogenated vegetable oils became a concern for your health, it has had a resurgence of popularity as a “Natural” food.
As well as baked goods It has been used in culinary recipes for centuries, often for game meats to add fat in the cooking process to very low-fat meats such as venison; by “Larding” a roast you insert the lard into the meat so it doesn’t dry out during cooking.
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