The Best of All Possible Worlds.

Some historians say that the best time of all – by which I assume they meant the most fun time - to be alive was between the two world wars, assuming one was sufficiently flush to be unaffected by the Great Depression and Prohibition of course.

The best of all possible worlds then, would surely have been aboard ship on a voyage to somewhere (who cares where?) in that hopeful time at the beginning of the 1920’s. The Great War had just ended, the Roaring Twenties was just beginning, and the nasty reality of the Great Depression was yet to spoil the dream.

If you were lucky enough to still be able to afford ocean travel and were aboard the SS Sonoma of the Oceanic Steamship Company, on February 24th 1929, here is what you would have had for dinner in second class.

Second Cabin Dinner.

Chow Chow Pickles

SOUP

Puree of Split Pea & Sippets

FISH

Baked Flounder Fine Herb Sauce

ENTREE

Haricot of Mutton

BOILED

Ribs of Beef Spanish

ROAST

Leg of Mutton & Jelly

VEGETABLES

Mashed Potatoes Boiled Onions Boiled Potatoes

SALAD

DESSERT

Sago Custard Vanilla Sauce

Water Ice Pie

Fruit in Season

Coffee      Cheese      Crackers     Tea

For today’s recipe, I give you a very dainty dish indeed, from a very aristocratic cookery book author, Lady Harriet Elizabeth St.Clair.

Sago Custard Puddings.
Take a spoonful and a half of sago, and put it into a saucepan with as much water as will cover it, a drop of cinnamon, three blades of mace, and some lemon-peel, and set it on to boil. When you find it clear and thoroughly done, add to it half a pint of new milk, and keep stirring it over the fire. When it becomes thick take it off, remove the seasoning, beat the yolks of four and the white of one egg well up with half a pint of cream; sweeten to taste; then take the milk and sago boiling hot, and mix well with the cream and eggs. Put it into small moulds, and bake or steam for ten minutes. Tapioca may be done in the same way.
Dainty Dishes (1866)

Quotation for the Day.

Who discovered we could get milk from cows, and what did he think he was doing at the time?
Billy Connolly.

Pudding Croutons.

This is my final post from the beach - normal service will be resumed on Monday when I am back in the city. For today we stay in pudding-land. ‘Pudding’, as it applies to the final sweet course of a meal, always suggests to me the substantial end of the dessert spectrum.

A little book called Puddings and Dainty Desserts (Thomas Murrey, New York, 1886) sounded like it would have a good range of substantial and the elegant dishes. It did - but it also upset my assumption, drawn from the introductory words on desserts, that the ‘puddings and dainty dishes’ were going to be sweet.

The first recipe in the book is a backward glimpse to the very British idea of the final course of dinner being a small savoury.

After-dinner Croûtons.
The hard water crackers being expensive in comparison with other crackers, I have adopted the crispy croutons as a substitute, and find them very acceptable. Cut sandwich-bread into slices one-quarter of an inch thick; cut each slice into four small triangles; dry them in the oven slowly until they assume a delicate brownish tint, then serve, either hot or cold. A. nice way to serve them is to spread a paste of part butter and part rich, creamy cheese, to which may be added a very little minced parsley.

Free Brandy.

The British public received an offer almost too good to believe in November 1905. The makers of Hennessy’s Brandy offered, via display advertisements in the newspaper, “free of charge and carriage pain, a quarter-pint sample” of their One-Star brandy - just in time for Christmas. Customers were to enclose their visiting card with the request form, which was to be cut from the newspaper. The free sample amount of half a pint was double the volume of the smallest bottle sold by James Hennessy, so it was not an insignificant freebie.

Messrs. Jas. Hennessy had two apparent reasons for their generosity. They expressed a heartfelt concern for the decline of Brandy and Soda as a popular national beverage, gave a considered opinion as to the reasons for this decline (a problem which presented ‘a curious psychological study’), and offered as a solution their One Star brandy. They also deeply regretted ‘that “cooking brandy” is synonymous in every home with inferior brandy’, and warned ‘do not imagine that a brandy which makes a superb brandy and soda is too good for cooking purposes.’ The lengthy advice noted that ‘on bad raisin would only spoil a corner of the pudding, but one ounce of bad brandy will spoil the whole pudding’.

The problem of inferior and imitation brandy was not only a problem of the Christmas season, of course. The article (one can hardly call it merely a Display Advertisement) continued:

‘The damage done by the use of inferior and spurious brandy does not stop short at the Christmas pudding, nor at Christmas time; for Brandy is employed in the preparation of numberless dishes. “Mrs Beeton’s Cookery Book” gives over fifty recipes in which Brandy is a necessary ingredient; and she very often qualifies the word brandy with the adjective “good”, probably from her own experience of the brandy which is usually used for cooking purposes.’

“Mrs Beeton’s Cookery Book” had gone through many alterations and revisions by 1905. The original work was published in 1861 as The Book of Household Management, and was far more than a mere recipe book. It contained, as its title suggests, a wide range of advice on such things as the management of servants, the laundry and linen requirements of a home, and legal matters pertaining to women. It is marvellous that four decades after publication of the book (and the author’s death), when this Hennessy advertisement was made, Isabella Beeton’s monumental work was still the gold standard English cookery.

Mrs Beeton’s Christmas Cake recipe is in the Vintage Christmas Recipes archive. Today I give you her brandy-inclusive Christmas Plum Pudding recipe, from the original edition.

CHRISTMAS PLUM PUDDING.

(Very Good.)

Ingredients.—l ½ lb. of raisins, ½ lb. of currants, ½ lb. of mixed peel, ¾ lb. of bread crumbs, ¾ lb. of suet, 8 eggs, 1 wineglassful of brandy.
Mode.—Stone and cut the raisins in halves, but do not chop them; wash, pick, and dry the currants, and mince the suet finely; cut the candied peel into thin slices, and grate down the bread into fine crumbs. When all these dry ingredients are prepared, mix them well together; then moisten the mixture with the eggs, which should be well beaten, and the brandy; stir well, that every thing may be very thoroughly blended, and press the pudding into a buttered mould; tie it down tightly with a floured cloth, and boil for 5 or 6 hours.
It may be boiled in a cloth without a mould, and will require the same time allowed for cooking.
As Christmas puddings are usually made a few days before they are required for table, when the pudding is taken out of the pot, hang it up immediately, and put a plate or saucer underneath to catch the water that may drain from it. The day it is to be eaten, plunge it into boiling water, and keep it boiling for at least 2 hours; then turn it out of the mould, and serve with brandy-sauce. On Christmas-day a sprig of holly is usually placed in the middle of the pudding, and about a wineglassful of brandy poured round it, which, at the moment of serving, is lighted, and the pudding thus brought to table encircled in flame.
Time.—5 or 6 hours the first time of boiling; 2 hours the day it is to be served.
Average cost, 4s.
Sufficient for a quart mould for 7 or 8 persons.
Seasonable on the 25th of December, and on various festive occasions till March.
Note.—Five or six of these puddings should be made at one time, as they will keep good for many weeks, and in cases where unexpected guests arrive, will be found and acceptable, and as it only requires warming through, a quickly-prepared dish.

Quotation for the Day.
From a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.
Katharine Whitehorn, The Office Party, 1962

Poetical Christmas Recipes, Part 2.

Another short and sweet – and musical – post today for you, folks. I hope your holiday season plans are going very smoothly, and your holiday catering even more smoothly. If you have not yet made your Christmas pudding, and you fancy one with a historical spin, you could refer to the Vintage Christmas Recipes archive. Alternatively, you could sing along with the following recipe from The Poetical Cookery Book, from the inimitable nineteenth century Punch (1852) magazine .

The Christmas Pudding.

Air: Jeannette and Jeannot.

If you wish to make a pudding in which every one delights

Of a dozen new-laid eggs you must take the yolks and whites;

Beat them well up in a basin till they thoroughly combine,

And shred and chop some suet particularly fine;

Take a pound of well-stoned raisins, and a pound of currants dried;

A pound of pounded sugar, and a pound of peel beside;

Stir them all well up together with a pound of wheaten flour,

And let them stand and settle for a quarter of an hour;

Then tie the pudding in a cloth, and put it in the pot,-

Some people like the water cold, and some prefer it hot;

But though I don’t know which of these two methods I should praise,

I know it ought to boil an hour for every pound it weighs.

Oh! If I were Queen of France, or better still, Pope of Rome,

I’d have a Christmas pudding every night I dined at home;

And as for other puddings, whatever they might be,

Why those who like the nasty things should eat them all for me.

Quotation for the Day

"Oh! All that steam! The pudding had just been taken out of the cauldron. Oh! That smell! The same as the one which prevailed on washing day! It is that of the cloth which wraps the pudding. Now, one would imagine oneself in a restaurant and in a confectioner's at the same time, with a laundry nest door. Thirty seconds later, Mrs. Cratchit entered, her face crimson, but smiling proudly, with the pudding resembling a cannon ball, all speckled, very firm, sprinkled with brandy in flames, and decorated with a sprig of holly stuck in the centre. Oh! The marvelous pudding!"
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

Treacle Beef.

A few days ago I marveled at the confusion created by the use of different words (shrimp and prawn) being used for essentially the same thing in America and Australia (and England). I am referring to ‘common usage’ of course – no doubt there is no doubt in the minds of zoologists – and I have to admit to having been mighty surprised at not being taken to task by one of those folk, in the wake of that post.

MY recent American visitor (blogger Kathryn McGowan) and I chatted at some length on this amusing issue of our two countries being divided by a common language. One topic of discussion was the difference (if any) between treacle and molasses. To my surprise, I find that I have covered the topic in a previous post. My memory must be failing me. The story also touched on ‘golden syrup’ – a great sugar substitute for the Brits during WW II, and absolutely essential in Australia for making Anzac biscuits and pouring over pikelets.

Treacle (see the previous post) really is a very marvelously versatile ingredient. It is used in many gingerbread recipes (below, in an earlier post this week, and in the Through the Ages with Gingerbread archive), and we have sampled it in treacle beer. It has popped up in many puddings, including the WW I ‘Peace Christmas Pudding’. Here it is in a recipe for preserved, smoked beef.


Dutch, or Hung Beef.
For fourteen pounds weight of the round, the rump, or the thick flank of beef, mix two ounces of saltpetre with the same quantity of coarse sugar; rub the meat with them in every part, and let it remain for two days, then add one pound of bay salt, four ounces of common salt, and one ounce of ground black pepper. Rub these ingredients thoroughly into the beef, and in four days pour over it a pound of treacle; rub and turn it daily for a fortnight; drain, and send it to be smoked. When wanted for table, lay it into plenty of cold water, boil it very slowly, and press it under a heavy weight while hot. A slice of this beef, from which the edges have been carefully trimmed, will serve to flavour soups or gravies as well as ham.
Beef, 14 lbs; saltpetre and coarse sugar, each 2 ozs.: 2 days
Bay salt, 1 lb.; common salt, 4ozs; pepper, 1 oz.: 4 days.
Treacle, 1 lb,: 14 days.
Obs. – Three quarters of a pound of coarse sugar may be rubbed into the meat at first, and the treacle may be altogether omitted: cloves and mace may be added in the same proportion for spiced beef.
Modern Cookery, Eliza Acton, 1845

Treacle has a long history of medicinal use too. I rather like the sound of this common cold remedy:


Treacle Posset
Boil a pint of milk, stir in two tablespoonfuls of treacle, let it boil up, and when the curds have well formed, strain the whey through a fine sieve into a basin, and serve hot at bedtime as a remedy for a cold.
Cookery for Invalids: Persons of Delicate Digestion, and for Children; Mary Hooper, 1876

And because we don’t make puddings nearly often enough these days, I give you for your winter delectation, an unashamedly very treacly treacle pudding from Queen Victoria’s chef.


A Treacle Pudding.
Ingredients: two pounds of flour, twelve ounces of treacle, six ounces of suet or dripping fat, a quarter of an ounce of baking powder, a pinch of allspice, a little salt, one pint of milk, or water. Mix the whole of the above-named ingredients in a pan, into a firm compact paste; tie it up in a well-greased and floured pudding cloth; boil the pudding for at least two hours and a half, and when done, cut it in slices, and pour a little sweetened melted butter over it.
Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes, Charles Elmé Francatelli, 1861


Quotation for the Day.

A waffle is like a pancake with a syrup trap.
Mitch Hedberg.

Plum Duff to Go.

Buying take-out on the way home from work is not a twenty-first century idea. The workers of Victorian London could buy a great variety of cooked food from street vendors who cried their wares from their regular pitches around the city. Make no mistake, this was not the gourmet end of the food spectrum. The arrangement was strictly for the “poorer sort” – which included the vendors themselves. The day to day life of these folk was a constant struggle to maintain a viable business, and the details are told most poignantly in an amazing sociological work by Henry Mayhew published in 1851. The full title is:

LONDON LABOUR

AND THE

LONDON POOR;

A

CYCLOPAEDIA OF THE CONDITION AND EARNINGS

OF

THOSE THAT WILL WORK,

THOSE THAT CANNOT WORK,

THOSE THAT WILL NOT WORK.

Many of the street sellers of food are described in Mayhew’s work. In a previous post we learned something of the sellers of hot cross buns, but there are many more. Amongst them are the vendors of curds and whey, hot elder wine, cakes and tarts, fried fish, hot eels and pea soup, rhubarb and spice, roasted chestnuts and apples, sheeps’ trotters, hot baked potatoes and pickled whelks. Today, to follow-on from yesterday’s story, I want to give you some of the details of the life and business of the street sellers of Plum “Duff” or Dough. It was very much a case of niche-marketing in those days – the Plum Duff vendors were separate from the vendors of “Boiled Puddings” (i.e meat puddings “which might perhaps with greater correctness be called dumplings”.)

Mayhew’s words on the plum duff sellers includes a “recipe” and costings:

“Plum dough is one of the street-eatables – though perhaps it is rather a violence to class it with the street-pastry – which is usually made by the vendors. It is simply a boiled plum, or currant, pudding of the plainest description. It is sometimes made in the rounded form of the plum-pudding; but more frequently in the "roly-poly" style. Hot pudding used to be of much more extensive sale in the streets. One informant told me that twenty or thirty years ago, batter, or Yorkshire, pudding, "with plums in it," was a popular street business. The "plums," as in the orthodox plum-puddings, are raisins. The street-vendors of plum "duff" are now very few, only six as an average, and generally women, or if a man be the salesman he is the woman's husband. The sale is for the most part an evening sale, and some vend the plum dough only on a Saturday night. A woman in Leather-lane, whose trade is a Saturday night trade, is accounted "one of the best plum duffs" in London, as regards the quality of the comestible, but her trade is not considerable.

The vendors of plum dough are the streetsellers who live by vending other articles, and resort to plum dough, as well as to other things, "as a help." This dough is sold out of baskets in which it is kept hot by being covered with cloths, sometimes two and even three, thick; and the smoke issuing out of the basket, and the cry of the street-seller, "Hot plum duff, hot plum," invite custom. A quartern of flour, 5d.; ½ lb. Valentia raisins, 2d.; dripping and suet in equal proportions, 2 ½d.; treacle, ½ d. ; and allspice, ½ d.—in all l0½ d. ; supply a roly-poly of twenty pennyworths. The treacle, however, is only introduced "to make the dough look rich and spicy," and must be used sparingly.

The plum dough is sold in slices at ½ d. or 1d. each, and the purchasers are almost exclusively boys and girls - boys being at least three-fourths of the revellers in this street luxury. I have ascertained - as far as the information of the street-sellers enables me to ascertain - that take the year through, six "plum duffers" take 1s. a day each, for four winter months, including Sundays, when the trade is likewise prosecuted. Some will take from 4s. to 10s. (but rarely 10s.) on a Saturday night, and nothing on other nights, and some do a little in the summer. The vendors, who are all stationary, stand chiefly in the street-markets and reside near their stands, so that they can get relays of hot dough.

If we calculate then 42s. a week as the takings of six persons, for five months, so including the summer trade, we find that upwards of 200 l [pounds] is expended in the street purchase of plum dough, nearly half of which is profit. The trade, however, is reckoned among those which will disappear altogether from the streets.

The capital required to start is: basket, 1s. 9d. ; cloths, 6d. ; pan for boiling, 2s.; knife, 2d. ; stock-money, 2S.; in all about, 7s 6d."

The recipes for the day are taken from yesterday’s source, Camp Cookery, by Horace Kephart, (1910).


Sweet Sauce for Puddings.
Melt a little butter, sweeten it to taste, and flavor with grated lemon rind, nutmeg, or cinnamon.

Brandy Sauce.
Butter twice the size of an egg is to be beaten to a cream with a pint of sugar and a tablespoonful of flour. Add a gill of brandy. Set the cup in a dish of boiling water, and beat until the sauce froths.


Quotation for the Day.

It's not improbable that a man may receive more solid satisfaction from pudding while he is alive than from praise after he is dead.
Anon?

A Plethora of Puddings.

Well, I did promise a story about the Pudding Club. Seven traditional English puddings are served at each Pudding Club dinner. After a small main course, the puddings are carried in in great state, to be admired before they are demolished. The rules are (1) each table can only go up to the pudding counter when called (2) only one pudding at a time (3) you must finish your pudding each time – clean your plate right up!.

I am proud to say I sampled all seven. On the evening I attended, the seven were:

- Spotted Dick- Bread and Butter Pudding (here, here, here)
- Autumn Pudding (a steamed pudding with dried fruit and apple)
- Ginger Syrup Pudding (another steamed pudding with a lovely sticky ginger coating)
- Squidgy Chocolate Pudding with nuts (and chocolate sauce)
- Lord Randall’s Pudding (a steamed pudding with apricots and orange, and marmalade – lovely). This is a special recipe of the club.
- Eton Mess with blackberries instead of the traditional strawberries.

Naturally, the puds are served with lashings of custard (8 gallons per evening), and by popular request over the decades, this is not made from scratch, but is the iconic British Bird’s brand.

Accolades and Congratulations for the Club for keeping these puddings alive.

Eton Mess is now a traditional part of the Eton Open Day in June, as well as of course, Wimbledon and the Henley Regatta. It seems that originally it may have been made with bananas, and was essentially just a mixture of these (or the strawberries) and cream or ice-cream. At some time (maybe in the 1930’s?), broken up meringues were mixed with the cream, and this is now the “traditional” recipe.

“Recipe” is not quite the right word, it is more of an assembly really. Just take approximately equal amounts of strawberries and cream, and fold them together with the broken up pieces of meringue – and serve immediately.

I should be arriving home in Brisbane shortly after this story pops up!