[Sca-cooks] cakes

[Nancy Kiel]

OK, now you've made me curious.  I always understood "steaming" of puddings to be putting your filled, closed pudding mold into a pot of boiling water, but not submerging it completely.  Mrs. Beeton has you tie a cloth  over the pudding basin, and submerge the whole, for boiled puddings.  I've done boiled puddings by tying the ingredients up in a  cloth and submerging the whole.   I would think only partly submerging a cloth-wrapped pudding would lead to uneven cooking. Any ideas on where/when the partially submerged approach came around?  Or completely enclosing the ingredients in a mold, for that matter, since I've always thought that method to be Victorian, but Mrs. B. doesn't mention it?

Nancy Kiel
"Sometimes, you get the best light from a burning bridge." --Don Henley
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Terry Decker<mailto:t.d.decker at worldnet.att.net> 
  To: Cooks within the SCA<mailto:sca-cooks at ansteorra.org> 
  Sent: Friday, May 20, 2005 10:37 PM
  Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] cakes


  You can steam a pudding in a pudding cloth and the instructions in some 
  cases are unclear as to whether the pudding is to be immersed or not.  As a 
  practical point it may not matter, but I haven't tried any experiments to 
  see if it does.

  Bear


  From: "Nancy Kiel" <nancy_kiel at hotmail.com<mailto:nancy_kiel at hotmail.com>>


  I thought steamed puddings were later than our time period...you don't see 
  the technique even in the 18th century really, although I have a vague 
  recollection of trying custards in little cups in a bake kettle/Dutch oven 
  with water.....


    Puddings can be boiled, steamed or baked.  Most of the ones I've 
  encountered
    that are close to Elizabethean call for a pudding cloth and boiling.  This
    recipe, however, is over fifty years later and consideration must be given
    to how much the French culinary traditions influenced Evelyn.

    Bear

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