John Farley’s 1783 Recipe for ‘Prune Pudding’
“From a quart of milk take a few spoonfuls, and beat in it six yolks of eggs and three whites, four spoonfuls of flour, a little salt and two spoonfuls of beaten ginger. Then by degrees mix in all the milk, and a pound of prunes. Boil it an hour tied up in a cloth, and pour melted butter over it. Damsons done this way eat full as well as prunes.”
John Farley, The London Art of Cookery and Housekeeper’s Complete Assistant (1783)
Another plum and/or damson recipe for plum and/or damson season today; this time it’s an old-school boiled plum pudding, courtesy of the “Principal Cook at the London Tavern”, from where the London Art of Cooking presumably gets its name.
The book was published in Dublin, so perhaps that’s where the London Tavern was also situated, back in the day? I searched online a bit and did find the beginning of this article which does mention a London Tavern, off Fishamble Street in Dublin, as early as 1661, but that building burned down in 1729, so unless it was subsequently re-built, it can’t be the same one that John Farley was working at in 1783. Perhaps Farley was at the London Tavern – a.k.a. the City of London Tavern, which was situated in Bishopsgate from 1768 until it was demolished in 1876 – instead? That would fit the date of publication better. And if this print from 1813 is anything to go by, the City of London Tavern was quite the significantly-sized dining establishment, which might explain the wide range of recipes in Farley’s book.
But I digress1Me? Digress? Surely not…. Back to the recipe at hand, and we find ourselves back in familiar, eighteenth century territory; with only a minimal description of the method, and just two two or three actual measurements of ingredients, with everything else given in “spoonfuls” – but no suggestion as to what size of spoon – and then, frankly, if you can’t rely on your own experience and knowledge from there, what on earth are you doing in a kitchen in the first place?2Honestly, some people, etc.
Okay, let’s assume that “spoonfuls” refers to table-spoonfuls. That seems reasonable. Although then a quart, which is two pints, of milk sounds like rather a lot of liquid to add to just four spoonfuls of flour? So perhaps… larger spoonfuls? As for the pound of prunes, I think Farley is calling for fresh plums here rather than dried prunes as we’d understand them, because he does say that damsons will work just as well.
I don’t know, it sounds like it could all go horribly wrong to me, especially if you don’t have much pudding-cloth-tying experience or general pudding-making knowledge to draw on.
But what do you think? Is this the sort of pudding you’d like to try? Do you have a better, more usefully descriptive recipe towards a similar result? Do please let me know if so, via the comments.
