(SMITH/POST) Look what I found folded between pages 146 and 147 of Grandma's "Every-Day Cook-Book":
Unfolded (and transcribed) below:
[Smith’s Boiled] Pudding
Chop fine a half pound of suet
Stone 2 Pounds of raisins
Soak a 5 penny loaf of Bread in
one
pint of milk. When it has taken
up all of the milk
add to it the raisins and suet
4 Eggs Well beaten
1 Cup of Brown sugar
1 nut meg
2 tablespoonfuls of flower
[flour]
put this in to 3 Pudding [bags
or basins] and Boil 3 ours [hours]
When I originally discovered this
crumbling, hand-written recipe tucked between the pages of my grandmother’s “Every-Day
Cook-Book,” I assumed that it was for making a traditional Christmas pudding
but I now think it was a special dessert occasionally prepared for a family’s Sunday
dinner. In contrast to the “Christmas Plum Pudding” recipe found published
on page 154 of this book, the humbler, hand-written version consists of only
half the ingredients and lacks the more extravagant additions of candied fruit
and peel, fragrant spices, and the brandy we might expect to find in a classic
holiday dessert. It also substitutes everyday bread for the richer ingredients
and was likely classified as a “Bread-Pudding.”
It is similar to a recipe found in Mrs. Beeton’s “Book of
Household Management,” 1861:
BOILED BREAD PUDDING.
INGREDIENTS: 1-½ pint
of milk, ¾ pint of bread crumbs, sugar to taste, 4 eggs, 1 oz. of butter, 3 oz.
of currants, ¼ teaspoonful of grated nutmeg.
MODE: Make the milk
boiling, and pour it on the bread crumbs; let these remain till cold; then add
the other ingredients, taking care that the eggs are well beaten and the
currants well washed, picked, and dried. Beat the pudding well, and put it into
a buttered basin; tie it down tightly with a cloth, plunge it into boiling
water, and boil for 1-1/4 hour; turn it out of the basin, and serve with sifted
sugar. Any odd pieces or scraps of bread answer for this pudding; but they
should be soaked overnight, and, when wanted for use, should have the water
well squeezed from them.
TIME: 1-1/4 hour
Average cost: 1s.; Sufficient:
for 6 or 7 persons; Seasonable: at any time.
One ingredient in the hand-written recipe seems pretty standard
for a pudding of this type: Bread. More specifically, “a 5 penny loaf”
of bread.
This leads to a few questions:
1.
Who wrote out this recipe and placed it
in this old book for use and safekeeping?
2.
What was the “missing” half of the title for
this recipe?
3.
How old is this recipe?
In answer to
Question #1: my great grandmother, Emma
(Emerine) Smith likely received this recipe from either her mother or her
mother-in-law, as was the custom of young housewives. In 1892, the year this
popular edition was printed, my great grandmother Smith would have been 32
years old, as wife to William and mother of daughters Grace, 14, and Lillie,
12. Both her mother, Marietta (Watson) Emerine and her mother-in-law Honour (Reynolds)
Smith had only recently died. A
"hand-me-down" family recipe would
have been a treasured legacy from either role-model.
I will venture to guess that the recipe was written out by Emma’s
mother-in-law, Honour. One reason is that the spelling and handwriting were
decidedly different from Emma’s (examples found elsewhere in the book), and likely
from an earlier generation. Another is that “pudding” is a very traditional
English dish, harkening back to the immigrant ancestry of both of her in-laws, Ishmael
and Honour. (Ishmael arrived with his family from Lincolnshire in 1837. Honour
was born the year her family emigrated from Suffolk in 1831.)
And my third reason is that this particular recipe was so special
to Emma that she had copied a brief summary of it onto the back of this book’s title
page (photo at left)…thereby solving the mystery of
Question #2: The name of this recipe
is
“Plum Pudding.” (BTW, plum pudding doesn’t include plums. Go figure. “Plum”
is a pre-Victorian term for raisins.)
As for Question #3: this recipe, if I’m right
about it being “passed down” in the family, is likely very old. But the
hand-written recipe may date to just before the turn of the century, probably
shortly before Emma’s mother-in-law died in 1889. The recipe’s “5-penny loaf” hint
provides some context. According to the calculations of the Consumer Price
Index, the standard cost of a regular loaf of bread around that time was
about five cents. (U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics)
(NOTE: It is worth considering that there was one more person who may have written out the pudding recipe for Emma. In 1892, her husband's English-born GRAND-mother -Sarah (Watts) Smith- was still alive.) PHOTO: William H. and Sarah (Watts) Smith, the parents of Ishmael Smith and the grandparents of Emma’s
husband--William R. Smith.
