Alexis Soyer’s 1855 Recipe for Fruit Puddings

“335A. Fruit Puddings.—Such as green gooseberry is best made in a basin, the basin to be buttered and lined with the paste, rolling it round to the thickness of half an inch ; then get a pint of gooseberries and three ounces of sugar ; after having made your paste, take half the fruit, and lay it at the bottom of your basin, then add half your sugar, then put the remainder of the gooseberries in and the remainder of the sugar ; on that draw your paste to the centre, join the edges well together, put the cloth over the whole, tying it at the bottom, and boil in plenty of water. Fruit puddings, such as apples and rhubarb, should be done in this manner ; boil for an hour, take out of the saucepan, untie the cloth, turn out on a dish, or let it remain in the basin, and serve with sugar over. A thin cover of the paste may be rolled round and put over the pudding.

Ripe cherries, currants, raspberries, greengage, plums, and such like fruit, will not require so much sugar, or so long boiling.”

Alexis Soyer, A Shilling Cookery for the People (1855)

This very simple recipe for a classic, English-style boiled pudding, which can be made with an assortment fruity fillings, was written in the 1850s by a rather remarkable author, Alexis Soyer.

Soyer was a French-born chef whose early career was spent working first in the kitchens of Paris and then of the English aristocracy, before he took up the post of head chef at the Reform Club in London, in 1837. So far, so typical of the high-class cooks of the day, but Soyer was a man with a deep social conscience, who was horrified by the potato famines in Ireland in the 1840s, who revolutionised the British army’s catering during the Crimean War of the 1850s, and who also wrote a pair of books of “plain cookery and domestic economy”, to advise working class housewives on how best to feed their families with cheap but nutritious meals.

A Shilling Cookery for the People, first published in 1854, is the second of the two, and is filled with “such receipts as should be of use to the artisan, mechanic and cottager”. It was compiled by Soyer after he had spent time visiting the homes of working class people to see what and how they cooked their food, in the facilities available to them. The recipes can all be prepared and cooked with as few utensils as possible – namely a gridiron, a frying pan, an iron pan and a black pot – and with ingredients that would most likely have been available to the majority of the working population in the mid-nineteenth century.

The recipe above is a prime example of the sort of food that Soyer was so keen on promoting: one of simple, cheap ingredients that could be cooked on a small, domestic stove and would result in a filling dish that would stick to the ribs of the working man or woman and help to fuel them through their next shift at factory, mine, mill or workshop. It’s also a great example of the sort of pudding that was hugely popular in what Dr. Neil Buttery calls the “golden age” of pudding cookery, in his hugely enjoyable book on the subject, The Philosophy of Puddings (2024).

“The paste” that Soyer refers to is detailed in recipe 319, in which his “pudding paste” comes in four versions, first class to fourth, varying the amount or type of fat included – eight, six and four ounces of suet per pound of flour, or four ounces of dripping for fourth class – depending on what the cook has available.

Building the pudding is just a matter of lining a pudding basin – another cheap, readily-available cooking utensil – with the paste, then adding two layers each of gooseberries, or the alternate fruit of your choice, and sugar, before drawing up the corners of the paste and sealing the top, then covering the whole with a cloth and boiling the pudding until it’s done. I’d imagine this would be done bain-marie style, rather than full-immersion.

Sprinkle with sugar to serve or, if you have it to hand, you could always add cream, butter, brandy sauce, or perhaps a good slosh of instant custard, à la Birds custard powder, which was invented in 1837 and mass-marketed in the U.K. from 1844.

How about you? Does this sort of simple but hearty boiled fruit pudding sound delicious, or just a bit too stodgy? Would you prefer a simple fruit tart (recipe 333), or a fruit tart, French fashion (recipe 320)? Do let me know, via the comments.