The spirit of cookery

A few puddings, however, are compounded directly from elementary cooking materials — e.g., Somersetshire puddings. A so-called Yorkshire pudding — such as is eaten with meat — is also made directly and baked ; but these are exceptional compositions amongst puddings. Indeed, a pudding is mostly, if we may be allowed to use an expression from petrology, a breccia — a compound formed of fragments of a material which had a previous independent existence, and bound together by a soft mortar or cement which was able to penetrate and fill the pores of, and intervals between, the lumps, and then become set by the culinary thermic process. It is by this that pudding becomes a unity, and receives a kind of gustatory homogeneity, however numerous and diversified may be the substances introduced into its con- stitution. Puddings should not be hard, or even too solid, but easily comminuted or squashed. The boiled cabinet gmdding, a distinctly English invention, is the very ideal of a confection of this kind. During the last years of the existence of the German 422 THE SPIRIT OF COOKERY Diet at Frankfort, that town was the metropolis of sel^ct international coolcery. The table d’hote of the Russische Hof on the Zeil reflected this culture, and its enterprising proprietor, Herr Sarg, well maintained this merited reputa- tion. He did so in all courses, all served on silver plate, but particularly by his puddings. When the Universal Peace Congress was assembled at Frankfort before the middle of the present century, many of its members dined at the Russische Hof, and they so well appreciated the fare, and particularly the puddings, that the quantity which was known to suffice for a certain number of persons in ordinary times had to be almost doubled during the Congress. In his ‘ Letters on Chemistry ’ the late Baron Liebig ascribed this fact, communicated to him by Sarg himself, to the cir- cumstance that a number of the Peace Congress men were total abstainers from alcoholic liquids. That may have contributed to the increased consumption of puddings, but we believe that the main cause of the unparalleled appetite, particularly of the Quaker members of the Congress, during that time was the unrivalled good quality of the puddings themselves. Our comparison of pudding with breccia has been anticipated by mineralogists in this, that they call some kinds of breccia imdding - stone. The concrete ■ of builders is an artificial imitation of the natural breccia ; the concreted variegated Carrara marble is the finest example of natural pudding-stone. Puddings are, for the purpose of being boiled, placed into a shape or mould, or tied up in a cloth, or secured in both a cloth and a mould as well. All moulds, whether of metal or earthenware or poi’celain, have to be buttered, and crumbed or floured, before the pudding material is placed in ; unlike souffles, puddings require but little space for ex- pansion. The mould containing the pudding may be sur- rounded by an outer vessel containing boiling water, a so- called water-bath, and may in this be placed in a hot oven THE BOILING OF PUDDINGS 423