Old Time Gingerbread and New Fangled Lemon Curd

It's Fall!  It's not 90F+ in my kitchen!
Let's bake.

These are two recipes I made for a tea party.

The first is gingerbread from Beeton's Book of Household Management  (you know my love of historical British cookery).

Here's the text:

THICK GINGERBREAD.

1760. INGREDIENTS.—1 lb. of treacle, 1/4 lb. of butter, 1/4 lb. of coarse brown sugar, 1-1/2 lb. of flour, 1 oz. of ginger, 1/2 oz. of ground allspice, 1 teaspoonful of carbonate of soda, 1/4 pint of warm milk, 3 eggs.

[Illustration: GINGERBREAD.]

Mode.—Put the flour into a basin, with the sugar, ginger, and allspice; mix these together; warm the butter, and add it, with the treacle, to the other ingredients. Stir well; make the milk just warm, dissolve the carbonate of soda in it, and mix the whole into a nice smooth dough with the eggs, which should be previously well whisked; pour the mixture into a buttered tin, and bake it from 3/4 to 1 hour, or longer, should the gingerbread be very thick. Just before it is done, brush the top over with the yolk of an egg beaten up with a little milk, and put it back in the oven to finish baking.

Time.—3/4 to 1 hour. Average cost, 1s. per square.

Seasonable at any time.

I basically followed this one by-the-book, but for a few changes:

1. I replaced baking soda with baking powder, and in doing so increased the volume to 3x (1tbspn) since baking powder is 1/3 baking soda by volume
2. I ignored her mixing instructions, which seemed frankly bizarre and instead mixed ala the muffin method (mix all the dry ingredients together, all the wet together, then just combine)  
3. I did not have a 1lb of treacle, so I used 1lb of cane syrup, which is basically the same thing as dark treacle
4. There's no temperature, so following a recipe in another cookbook I did 375.  This was a mistake.  By 45min the gingerbread was done, but I found it quite dry when eating it, best slathered with jam or dunked in tea.  For a moister version I might try 325.*

*Then again, maybe it's supposed to be dry and not moist?  I feel like a lot of what I have baked lately is slightly dry, and this may be because I have switched to stoneground whole wheat flour from whole kernels.  Hmm. . .

I would totally recommend this, with the baking time change caveat or a lot of jam.

My photo standards are really going down hill.

NEXT we jump forward from the pinnacle of 1850s cookery to maybe the pinnacle of 1950s cookery with microwave lemon curd.

To be honest, I was not going to post on this because it's mostly cribbed from one recipe and there are so many variants out there, but I got some requests so here it goes.

Googling "lemon curd" I came across this recipe by Gordon Ramsay:

"Ingredients for about 1 1/2 cups Lemon Curd:

3 whole large eggs

3/4 cup white sugar

2/3 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice

1 1/2 tbsp freshly grated lemon zest

5 tbsp unsalted butter, room temp, cut in 3 or 4 pieces"

It seemed perfect.  By a British person?  check.  Not having to separate yolks? check.

But you may notice the complete lack of ummm instructions on the page.

This lead to more googling for correct addition order, in which I found many sites claiming you could skip the bain marie and just do this in a microwave!  (I know many chefs skip bain maries anyway and go directly to the stove, but I would totally burn it that way.)

I had to try!

These are the changes I made:

1. I used 4tbspn butter because I was doubling the recipe and that meant I could use one stick
2. I used something closer to 2-3tbspn zest (6 in total) because I LOVE zest.  basically just zest every single lemon.  Yummmm
3. I think I may have used 1/2cup sugar.  Honestly recipes really vary on this.  I would say use the standard amount unless you are trying to cut back for some reason.  

The method I followed:

1. Melt the butter
2. Throw everything in a bowl
3. Taste it (yes I know there is raw egg).  make sure it's not too sweet or sweet enough
4. Whisk it until blended
5. Microwave for 1min
6. Whisk until blended
7. Iterate 5&6 until it starts ballooning in size
8. Microwave in 30sec increments with lots of whisking maybe 3-4 more times
9. Take a small amount on a spoon and put it in the freezer for a minute.  Does it firm up?  If yes you are done cooking, if not, microwave some more
10. Strain the lemon curd through a mesh strainer to remove zest bits and make a smoother consistency
11. Chill

So good there's none left

The one thing I was really disappointing in that I made for the tea party was scones.  They came out like really dense sugar cookies.  I will be working on scone recipes in the coming few weeks trying to perfect one, because seriously!

Mrs. Beeton's Christmas Plum Pudding

Now Bring us a Figgy Pudding!

In the spirit of both Christmas and Historical Cookery I endeavored to cook Recipe 1328 from The Book of Household Management by Isabella Beeton:  "Christmas Plum-Pudding (Very Good)"

This book is full of recipes, anthropology, history, and a surprising amount of perspective into the lives of Victorian housewives.  A first edition facsimile like I used can be gotten here, or you can simply pick up the free Kindle edition, or the one at Project Gutenberg.

For those who don't know, Christmas Pudding / Plum Pudding / Figgy pudding is a traditional Christmas dessert which, paradoxically, neither contains plums nor figs, and does not fit the American definition of pudding.  What it is is the boozy predecessor to the fruit cake.

Like fruitcake, this is very dense.  Beeton says this recipe produces a 1 quart mold of pudding suitable for 5 or 6.  In my experiment I got 2 1 quart molds, that would feed ~8 people each for a total of 16 servings.

Traditionally this is made the weekend before Thanksgiving, and stored at least a month to "age".

The Ingredients: (by weight!)

Bread Crumbs

• 1.5lb raisins
• 0.5lb currants
• 0.5lb mixed peel
• 0.75lb bread crumbs
• 0.75lb suet (unrendered beef fat)
• 8 eggs
• 1 wineglass full brandy 
• Pudding Basin
• Parchment paper
• Cheesecloth
• A big mixing bowl

Before we can start cooking we need to cover some of these ingredients more in depth. . .

Mixed Peel:  We're talking candied citrus peel, usually a 50 / 50 mix of orange and lemon.  You can make this on your own (if enough people ask I will post a recipe for this), but I bought mine at Berkeley Bowl.  Make sure to mince the peel.

Bread Crumbs:  These need to be super fine.  Beeton recommends grating them on a cheese grater, but I pulsed them in a food processor.  Also the bread should be dried in an oven, not stale.  I made a really basic white bread ala Ratio (5 parts / 600g flour, 3 parts / 360g water, 2 tspn yeast, 1.5 tspn salt, 1 tbspn sugar) and then sliced and dried it.

Suet:  This can be hard to find.  I recommend going to a butcher that cuts/trims their own meat.  Make sure they stick the suet through a meat grinder for you, so you don't have to finely mince it on your own.

"1 wineglass" of Brandy: I added a modern white-wine-glass-ful, and then worried it was too much compared to Victorian wineglass volumes, but the final product does not at all taste too much of brandy so just go with any modern glass you have lying around. 

Pudding Basin:  You have 3 options here.  You can buy fancy aluminum basins at cooking stores or online that give your pudding cool shapes , or go for a classic ceramic British pudding basin, or just use a glass or ceramic bowl you have lying around. Whatever you use needs to have a lip to tie string around.  As mentioned above, the recipe calls for a 1 quart mold  but I filled 2 1 quart molds, so best to have a second one handy or buy a 2 quart mold.

Disclaimers out of the way, let's get on to the cooking!

*If you are using an aluminum mold, steps 8-10 will be different for you

1. Mix all the dry ingredients in a big mixing bowl
2. Add the suet and continue to mix
3. Add the brandy to the eggs and whisk until blended
4. Pour egg/brandy mix over the other ingredients
5. Mix again  (At this point you are dealing with large messy volumes  and your goal is a homogeneous mixture, so I recommend abandoning the spoon and using your hands.)



Mixed Pudding

6. Butter your mold/basin/whathaveyou generously
7. Pack the pudding into the mold.  You don't want to go above the edge, but you do want to compact it down
8. Cut out 2 circles of parchment paper to the same diameter as the bowl, and place them on top of the pudding mix
9. Cover the top of the bowl with a square of 4-ply cheesecloth big enough to be tied down under the lip
10. Using kitchen twine, tie the cheesecloth onto the basin, then make a handle out of twine for moving the bowl into and out of boiling water.
11. Boil the pudding for 6 hours
1. DO NOT let the water level get above the top of the pudding.  Start with the water ~1 inch below the top of the bowl, and keep the pot covered and simmering with the water at this level.  This will require you to frequently top up the pot with more hot water. (I found an electric kettle indispensable)
12. After 6 hours remove the pudding and put it away in a cupboard to store.  Do not remove/replace the cheesecloth or parchment paper as everything is now boiled and sterile. 
13. Before serving reboil for 2 hours as per step 11
14. Upend the basin / mold onto a pate
15. Light a ladle of brandy on fire, and pour it over the pudding
16. Serve with heavy cream, whipped cream, or hard sauce (recipes for all of these can be found online)

Pudding Unveiled

Pudding After Boiling, Ready for Storage

More Boozy Variation:

Another traditional way to make the pudding it to forgo the mold/basin/bowl and simply make a tight round sphere of pudding encased in 4 ply cheesecloth.  Because this is more open to the air, you need to keep spoilage at bay by pouring a generous amount of brandy over the pudding 1-2x a week.  However, Beeton's version does not recommend this step, she merely stored the pudding in cupboards, so I did not make my pudding this way.  I added the parchment paper lids under the cheesecloth specifically because I was worried about aerobic bacteria growing on the pudding without regular brandyings

Tiny Currants and Huge Raisins

Taste

This pudding came out much mellower than other Christmas puddings I have had.  The beef suet and the relatively small amount of currants and peel gave it a smooth and less tart flavor that I quite like.  I would say it beats modern store bought versions hands down, and that if you find modern home made Christmas Pudding to be too tart, you will find this a pleasant alternative.  Another contributor to the excellent flavor may have been the extremely plump flame raisins I bought from Berkeley Bowl.

Pudding on FIRE!

To finish I would like to thank Walter for his technical expertise from years of making modern Chrstmas Puddings, which helped me interpret some of Mrs. Beeton's instructions.