Historic Cooking: Fig Bread Pudding from 1907 and the history of Figgy Pudding.

from AntiqueClipArt.com.

Happy New Year!  "Time flies ..." and all that.  I have settled in to my new place -- a vintage Airstream trailer from 1967 -- but haven't got the oven up and working yet (it runs on propane and involves open flame every time you use it ...) so the only historic cooking I've done so far has been on the stovetop (also propane, involving open flame) and I haven't gotten many photos of the projects.  I am working on a Twelfth Night Cake for the coming week (I'll bake it in my mom's regular electric oven), so hopefully I'll get that written up and posted within the month.  One Historical Food Fortnightly challenge which I made this year, I also did last year but didn't get around to posting about it -- Figgy Pudding.  I decided to use a different recipe for figgy pudding, one that didn't take as long to boil as the one I usually use, so the research for that sent me down the rabbit hole of figgy pudding history.  I ultimately decided that I like the flavor of the Victorian recipe better than this one, but it was still an interesting recipe.

Just after Thanksgiving I made another figgy pudding for my Christmas caroling choir – the Lyric Theatre Victorian Carolers – as I have for the past several years, but this year I wanted to try a different recipe.   In researching other recipes, I followed one of the many "bunny trails" that I remembered from my previous research on the topic of figgy pudding: what is it and how old is it? 

Fig Bread Pudding.
Photo: Elizabeth Urbach.

Figgy pudding seems like such an old-fashioned treat, the kind that dates back to at least the 18th century, but my own investigation into period cookbooks has turned up surprisingly few recipes for it -- under the name "figgy pudding" -- that date before the Victorian era. In The Monthly Magazine: Devonshire and Cornwall Vocabulary from 1810, it defines "figs" as: "Figs, raisins. A "figgy pudding"; a pudding with raisins in it; a plumb pudding." Also, there is a somewhat sniffy (in my opinion) entry in The Oracle—A Weekly Journal of Response, Research, and Reference from December 1882, which states, in answer to the question "In Somersetshire the poor people call raisins figs and a plain pudding they speak of as a figgy pudding. Why is this?" that "It would be hopeless to seek a rational explanation of the error. We can only surmise that in the days when communication was less facile than at present, the rural population having little acquaintance with colonial produce, used figs as a convenient generic term for the dried fruits sold by grocers. ... We do not think the error is peculiar to the poor: it is rather characteristic of the rural population." Well, la di da!

The authors of most "history of figgy pudding" articles on the Internet seem to agree that figgy pudding, plum pudding, and Christmas pudding are all names for the exact same thing, that none of those dishes actually contain figs or plums, and that this somehow made sense to the people of the past because they were weird like that way back then.  However, that kind of explanation for "why people in the past did things a certain way" always makes me suspicious, because it so often turns out to be totally untrue!

A long-awaited update!

Me and two friends in 1920s
costume at the local Egyptian
Museum, September 2016.
Photo: Ann Morton.

Hello everyone in blog-land!  "I'm not dead yet!" as goes the line from Monty Python's _Holy Grail_ ... As you may have surmised, things have been changing around here, but hopefully I'll be settled for a good while and can get back to my cooking, costuming, and general historical nerd-ery.

I moved twice this year, once at the beginning of September, and again at the end of September/beginning of October.  I have mostly unpacked my things; still finding places to put things and working out what I need to add to my storage supplies so that I have a place for everything, so I still have a couple stacks of boxes waiting to be unpacked, or to be taken to my storage unit.  I think I have all my costuming and cooking supplies at the house, but the homeowners are doing some remodeling to the kitchen, so there is sawdust and paint and caulking and dropcloths everywhere, so I can't do much baking yet.  I did make two figgy puddings, from the recipe I blogged about here, so that's something at least!  I totally failed at getting my Christmas cards out on time, so yet again they will be New Year's/holiday cards, because I really need to let my family know my new address ...

The new year approaches!

clipart from Webweaver.nu

Well, Christmas Day has come and gone, and I don't know about you, but I'm never ready for it to be over!  It's always a let-down to me, when all the preparation and holiday spirit is finished after one day; I much prefer the older tradition of 12 Days of Christmas!  It's not like there's not enough treats to last at least half that long, plus, I always run out of time to make all the things I wanted to make, and then I have the week between Christmas and New Year off from work, with some actual time to make things ... and no celebrations to make them for!  Thankfully, my family is spread out over the United States, and so we always end up having more than one Christmas celebration anyway, trying to see as many people as possible.  This year, I'm going to think of the whole time until January 4 (when I go back to work) as the Christmas season, still, and try to get in as much cooking and sewing as possible.

We all like our figgy pudding!

Figgy pudding just out of the kettle.

Well, the pudding is out of the kettle and cooling on a rack now.  It looks like the waxed paper did its job of protecting the pudding from the rust on the inside of the mold, although it looked like the rust didn't come off on the paper anyways!  Interestingly, there is now more rust on the outside of the mold, in a line halfway down from the lid, where the water level was.  I'm not sure how to remove that.  There was also a metallic black residue that came off of the outside of the lid when I took the mold out of the kettle, but that has disappeared now that the mold isn't covered with steam.

Figgy pudding out of the mold. 

In any case, the pudding came out of the mold perfectly (of course it was surrounded with waxed paper) and hardly stuck to the waxed paper at all.  I let it boil for the full 4 hours called for by the recipe, and when I tested the pudding with a knife stuck in the center, there were no crumbs or batter stuck to the knife, and it felt firm yet moist.  It didn't rise at all, so I hope it's not too heavy!  It smells good, like figs and butter, but I can't smell the nutmeg at all.  I hope we'll be able to taste it.  I haven't decided whether or not to make a sauce to serve with it tomorrow night.  We'll see.

Even though, as the saying goes, "the proof of a pudding is in the eating," I'm calling this a success! 

Oh, bring us some figgy pudding!

vintage pudding mold.
Photo: Elizabeth Urbach

I finally got started on my baking last week, and hopefully I'll get it all done before I have to start giving baked goods away as Christmas presents!  Don't want to give out any I.O.U.s for cookies ...  Anyway, I got the two kinds of Italian cookies baked, as well as two apple pies (for Thanksgiving), and the first historic recipe of the season: figgy pudding!  I recently bought an antique pudding mold in one of the antique shops in Niles, and I've been wanting to use it ever since!  Unfortunately, there was a bit of rust on the inside, so I wasn't sure if I could boil a pudding in it and avoid getting rust residue on the pudding.  I had received a tip that apple cider vinegar would remove the rust and leave the metal food-safe, but when I scrubbed the rust with the vinegar it didn't seem to remove any of it.  Granted, I didn't let it soak more than a minute or so before scrubbing ... I ended up deciding to line the mold with waxed paper instead of just buttering it like the recipe said, to give a little more protection.  We'll see if that was enough when the pudding comes out of the steamer!