The rolodex of random thoughts

Yes, I know it sounds weird.  But yes, I had dreams about pudding.  Before you rush to judgment, there really IS a reason.

Last night, I spent the better part of the night making puddings for the Victorian fundraiser dinner this weekend.  While the cookbooks are a bit better than Renaissance cookbooks that frequently leave you hanging with little more than a partial ingredient list, Victorian recipes are not always as detailed as I would like.  On the one hand, they are pretty good about listing measurements and (usually) all of the ingredients.  But when it comes to things like temperatures and cooking method, they assume that the cook knows what to do.  Thus… the need for a little bit of experimentation.

For the dinner, my red-headed cohort-in-crime and I decided to go with a rich cherry pudding in butter and wine sauce.  JUST IN CASE the recipe utterly and completely flops, I decided to also try a coconut pudding recipe from a different Victorian cookbook. 

For the coconut pudding, I made two batches in different types of moulds.  The recipe called for them to be baked.  When I read the recipe, it really sounded to me to be more like a firm custard than it does a traditional “pudding,” I figured that baking them in a water bath would work out fairly safe.  As for the cherry pudding, no such safe grounds.  Since the recipe called for 18 ounces of suet, this means real, genuine Victorian pudding.  Oddly enough, the recipe called for it to be either “baked or boiled.”  Boiled puddings are, to me, pretty disgusting and FAR from pretty when it comes to presentation.  As for baking, it made me nervous to bake a suet pudding.  Suet really needs to be slowly cooked at a low temperature or it risks coming up lumpy and overly firm.  This left one other option not mentioned in the book – good old fashioned pain-in-the-ass Victorian steaming.

Having enough goo for two batches, I poured some of the pudding goo into a Victorian mould to try baking in a water bath.  The rest of it went into a lidded-pudding mold and into a steamer.  After 40 minutes of baking, I pulled the water-bath version to let cool.  2 ½ hours later, I turned off the steam pot to let it slowly cool and settle. 

This morning, I tried the baked cherry pudding.  Good flavor, but very, very firm uneven texture.  Pretty good, but not quite what I wanted.  Cracking open the steamed version, it looks great!  I’ll try taking it out of the mold tonight to see how well it formed and what the texture is.  If all works out well, I will do this version again on Friday night for the Saturday night dinner.

By the time I went to bed, I kept playing over pudding case-scenarios in my head (thus the dreams).  Wish me luck, gang.