welcome to 18th century cooking I'm your host Jon Townsend today we're going to relax
we're going to slow down do a nice simple recipe this one's called a mulberry pudding
thanks for joining us today as we savor the flavors in the aromas of the 18th century
so this one is so incredibly simple but it's got a good and fun twist to it somebody was emailing
me they were asking about mulberries because now is the mulberry time of year they are everywhere
and you know mulberry trees are very very prolific sometimes a little too prolific growing in places
you don't want them to but around here I've got lots and lots of sort of wild mulberries I didn't
plant them but they've got lots of fruit they're loaded with mulberries right now so why not use
them why not use them in a recipe from the 18th century so I went and did some digging real quick
and mulberries show up in a lot of wine recipes you can find any number of mulberry wine recipes
but they don't necessarily get used in cooking as much at least mentioned in a recipe but berries
like this can be you can use raspberries you can use all kinds of berries and this one is one
where the author decided to really give us the hint in that this is Hannah Glass's the art of
cookery this is the classic cookbook from the 18th century and here we have to make an apple pudding
make a good puff paste roll it out half an inch thick that's puff paste pare your apples core them
enough to fill the crust and tie it up close tie it in a cloth and boil it
if a small pudding two hours if a large one three to four hours when it is enough turn
it onto your dish cut a piece of the crust out of the top butter and sugar it to your palate
lay on the crust again and send it off to the table hot a pear pudding can be made the same
way and thus you may make a damson pudding or any sort of plums apricots cherries or mulberries
they are very fine so we can use anything so this pudding is incredibly simple we're going
to make up we're going to make a paste like a pie crust and she calls for a puff paste
they use the word puff paste very liberally in the 18th century we don't have to have it be that you
know 5,000 layers of butter puff paste some people just buy it from the store but it's not going
to be a half inch thick we're going to make a standard pie crust for this one work out perfectly
and basically we make a ball that's hollow we toss a bunch of berries in it and boil it for two hours
and then pour in a whole bunch of butter and sugar how what could go wrong right so let's get started
do
our pie crust is looking really good I can't wait to see what it's going to turn out like all boiled
into our pudding that's going to be a lot of fun this episode is brought to you by Townsends Plus
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now this pie crust is very very simple it's plain old
pie crust we use some flour and butter in a one to three ratio so three times the weight of flour as
butter and this we mix it up very carefully so that you don't want the butter to melt
and when we get that mixed up kind of cut in I just rub it in we add a little bit of cold
water to bring it all together and this is our pie crust you know basically their puff paste
was let's say a pie crust with a lot of butter well same thing we've got here I'm just gonna
hand kind of turn this into a bowl and I've got our cloth here that we're going to boil it in
so I'm going to just set it down in here while I make this so that it doesn't fall apart
before we put our dough into our cloth we need to make sure that it's been boiled and then we flour
it first we don't want to tear this pudding when we take it out a cloth this will help it release
nicely we've got our ball here turned into a bowl in the cloth here to make it a lot easier to form
up and I've put in just enough berries so that we can close it up really the amount of berries has
to do with how big your bowl is so how much flour you started with you're going to make a big one
and it takes four hours to boil then you can do that we just want to do a small
one we don't want to boil forever all we have to do is figure out how to get this closed up
now and we need to make sure since it's going to be boiling water that it closes up properly
it seals nicely or else water will get in there and ruin our pudding we don't want that to happen
we've got this tied up in our cloth and it is ready to cook this is going to boil about an
hour and a half to two hours shouldn't take a super long time this isn't a big
pudding we don't want to get really hot in here so i'm going to use our
outdoor kitchen we're going to actually boil this over a campfire outside so
let me get this on to cook because I'm hungry I want to see what it turns out like
so
my
the pudding is now out of the boiling water I dipped it in cool water so that's kind of one of
the tricks it hardens that outer shell up a little bit so that when you take the cloth off it doesn't
pull it apart uh this one came out perfectly so I really floured this one well this came out really
looking really good solid no tears or anything cut that top off put the butter in put the sugar in
uh let's take this top off and take a look at how that turned out you can just see the berries
are perfectly cooked in there okay like already the saliva is running this is this looks really
really good uh the butter melted in here you could probably stir it a little bit if you wanted
that to sink down around in there um obviously the berries are not gonna set up in there this is just
a wonderful little like serving device now she says serve it up to the table hot you know put
the lid on serve it up the table hot so it's supposed to come up to the table like this
and then how do you serve it to the individuals really really good question I don't know I'm
guessing that you know when it's time to service serve it they just sort of cut it up in slices
and expect to dish out a portion of the you know portion of the shell and a portion of the berries
so let's just let's just cut into this real quick
and there it is a cut open the outer crust is really sticking together and
we can get a bite here of just some berries a little bit of the crust
very very good
this reminds me of like a raspberry cobbler so if you've ever done cobblers you just sort
of you know put all the berries in there some sugar and then you you know throw on
a topping but this is all enclosed this is like a cobbler in a ball right it has a great look to it
and um fantastic fantastic flavor as that butter and the sugar kind of work down through the uh the
entire dish as it were um this is this is really really good this one is so incredibly simple
wonderful tasting and very very few ingredients all you need is flour and butter a little bit
of sugar and your berries and what you can use so many different kind of components here the
original one was maybe apple uh but I think it works even better with these soft berries so
you could do this with strawberries obviously with raspberries any kind of fruit and you get this
really really tasty wonderful 18th century dessert I'm sure it was enjoyed
many many times 250 years ago so just like I'm enjoying it today I want to thank you
for coming along and joining with me as we savor the flavors and the aromas of the 18th century