[Sca-cooks] cakes

[Terry Decker]

Boiled and steamed puddings are one of those subjects I have more questions 
than answers.  I experimented with a couple of recipes many years ago and I 
have a few recipes, most of uncertain provenance.  I was given the 
impression you can steam a pudding in a pudding cloth, but I don't know the 
details (yet).

Markham (The English Housewife, 1615) gives instructions to stuff puddings 
into cleaned pigs intestines (farmes) and to boil them, pricking them with 
an awl as they swell to keep them from bursting.  This would be similar to 
steaming puddings in sealed mold.  I would suspect the molds are a later 
adaptation of the technique and that Markham's use of intestines is an 
Elizabethean method.

I'm begging some exerpiments with boiled doughs (German simmels leading into 
marzipan stuffed simnels and on to modern simnel cake).  Once I get the my 
paper on simnels out of the way, I may take a serious look at puddings. 
Collect the recipes, temporally order them and do comparative tests of the 
techniques.

Bear


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
  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.commailto: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