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| Joseph Cooper's Hasty Pudding cooked in bag, served with orange and nutmeg. |
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| Hannah Glasse's Flour Hasty Pudding |
Last week’s work with eighteenth century vermicelli got me thinking about another pasta that was known in the English-speaking world during the period.
“Yankee Doodle went to town
A-riding on a pony,
Stuck a feather in his cap
And called it macaroni.”
“Macaroni,” because rich young English men were visiting Italy on their travels, had become a term meaning “fashionable,” often overly so. The probably English author of these lyrics was, then, making fun of an American who supposedly thought that putting a feather in his cap set him at the height of fashion.
That historic tangent aside, I am actually focusing on another food from another bit of that famous colonial song.
“Father and I went down to camp,
Along with Captain Gooding.
And there we saw the men and boys
As thick as hasty pudding.”
Hasty pudding was an established dish well before the days of the Revolutionary War. The American variant by this point was made with cornmeal but the English versions in that century and the century before were usually made using flour.
I present a couple recipes for this very basic staple meal. One is from Hannah Glasse and, like last week’s “Turnip Soop,” it is included in the “Fast-Days" section of The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747). The other are instructions “To make a hasty Pudding in a Bagge” by Joseph Cooper and are included in The Art of Cookery Refin'd and Augmented (1654). The same recipe is copied a few years later by Robert May in The Accomplisht Cook (1660). Glasse’s is more savoury, while Cooper’s is something closer to what is called pudding in North America today. I will say upfront neither turned out great in terms of texture and are pretty basic in flavour. Still, you learn a bit every time, hopefully.
Recipes
"To make a Flour Hasty-Pudding"
Based on the recipe by Hannah Glasse
Ingredients
- 560 ml (about 1 Imperial pint) of milk, plus 25ml (1 ½ Tbsp)
- 2 bay leaves
- 1 egg yolk, beaten
- 1 tsp salt
- About 70g (½ cup) flour
- 15g of butter cut into small pieces
Instructions
Begin heating 560ml of milk and the bay leaves in a medium pot over medium/high heat. Stir frequently to keep from burning on the bottom.
Meanwhile, in a medium bowl, mix egg yolk with 25ml of milk and the salt.
When your milk comes to a boil, remove from heat and discard your bay leaves.
Beginning a spoonful at a time so as not to scramble it, add your hot milk to the egg mixture in the bowl, stirring constantly.
After 5 or so spoonfuls of milk, you can begin adding at a faster rate but continue stirring the whole time. Continue until you have emptied your hot milk into the bowl.
With a funnel if needed, return the mixture to the pot and place back on the heat.
With your flour in a container in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other, slowly begin adding your flour to the pot. Stirring constantly, shake in a very small amount of flour at a time, to try to prevent lumps from forming.
Continue until the mixture has come to a low boil and it has reached a custardy thickness. You can add more flour if, for some reason, it has not thickened enough.
Pour and spoon out into a bowl and dot the surface with bits of butter.
Serve.
Notes
The instructions in her Art of Cookery are pretty clear until they aren’t anymore. The initial milk and the bay leaves she says to “set on the Fire to boil” and then has you mix the egg yolks with a specific quantity of cold milk. Next you “stir in your milk,” which must be your hot, boiled milk and she later adds that you remove your bay leaves at this point. With “a wooden spoon in one Hand, and the Flower in the other” you then stir it until it is a good thickness. The implication, not any explicit instruction, says you are adding the flour and that the milk and eggs are in the pot over the heat. She next says to “let it boil” so it needs to be back on the heat at some point.
The problem with adding flour to warming milk is keeping lumps from forming. I resorted to a whisk rather than a wooden spoon but still it was not the greatest texture, though better than the other version boiled in a cloth bag. See my thoughts on that below.
Overall, this is a decent base to something but even with bay leaves, salt, and butter, this is pretty bland. It tastes mostly like a bechamel, which you then do something with. I added some Louisiana hot sauce to finish mine. It is from Hannah Glasse’s Fast-Day recipes, so I guess it is not necessarily supposed to be the most exciting - so there you go.
“To make a hasty Pudding in a Bagge.”
Ingredients
- 45cm x 45 cm (18” x 18”) piece of muslin or other food-safe cloth.
- Kitchen string
- 40g (about 5 Tbsp) flour, plus more for dusting
- 473ml cream
- 2 tsp sugar
- ½ tsp nutmeg
- ½ tsp salt
- Butter to serve
- Optional lemons or oranges for serving.
Instructions
Soak your cloth in the sink for a few minutes.
Wring it out and lay over a large heat-safe bowl.
Sprinkle flour over a section of the cloth about the size of a plate in the bottom of the bowl.
Use your wooden spoon to swirl it around and coat that area evenly.
Put a medium pot, half full of water on high heat and bring to a boil.
(See Notes for the actual next step I took here.)
Put flour in another medium pot and slowly add cream a bit at a time. Stir constantly and make sure flour mixture is smooth before adding more cream.
When all the cream is incorporated, place the pot on medium/high heat.
Stirring frequently, allow the cream to come to a boil then add sugar, nutmeg and salt. Stir finally to combine.
Pour onto the floured cloth in a bowl.
Lift the edges to form a bag and tie closed with kitchen string.
Carefully place this bag of pudding in your pot of boiling water and cook for about 20 minutes, making sure your water level remains high enough and the top of your bag does not droop close to the burner.
Remove your bag into the bowl you were using before and allow it to cool a little.
Open the bag and pour and/or scrape your pudding into a serving bowl.
Smooth out with a spoon and serve with butter and lemon or orange slices.
Notes on History and Adaption
This recipe comes from Joseph Cooper, self-identified as the “chiefe Cook to the Late KING” on his book’s title page. The late King would be Charles I, disposed and executed a few years before the recipes are published in 1654. The text precedes the wave of published English cookery books that come after the restoration of the monarchy, which occurred in 1660 when Charles II returned to his home country and took the throne after Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth. The cookery authors that follow and take from Cooper’s recipes include Robert May and Hannah Woolley.
After denigrating previous cookery book attempts Cooper makes an interesting statement in his address to the reader: “Ladies, forgive my confidence if I tell you, that I know this piece will prove your favourite; and if any thing displeases you, it will be to see so many uncommon, and undeflour'd Receipts [recipes] prostituted to the publique view, which perchance you will think might have been plac'd better among the paper-secrets in a few of your Cabinets; but 'tis easie to pardon that offence, which is onely committed in favour of the Common good.” This participates in and helps lead a period trope in which the supposed private recipes of nobles were published to a growing reading public. I mention a bit about this idea in my historical notes on venison pasty, referencing The Queens Closet Opened and The Queen-like Closet, cookery books that followed Cooper’s.
Focusing on his actual recipe for “Hasty Pudding,” it was one of several references to the preparation in his work. It was a common term and dish in the seventeenth century and earlier. Cooking pudding in a bag is a practice still seen today, most especially with Christmas pudding, though, at least as mine turned out, this has a much thinner consistency. This seemed sort of okay, since the instructions say if it is done well “it will be so good as a Custard.”
I used the proportions of ingredients that Cooper gives, with a slight adjustment in quantity. I had a US pint of cream (473ml), while the pint the period recipe is referring to would probably be closer to a modern Imperial pint (568ml). I consequently reduced the flour he called for from 6 spoonfuls to 5, using tablespoons going from what I know about seventeenth century spoons. The other ingredient quantities are not specified and thus were determined based on experience and taste. I did serve with orange or lemon for another flavour.
I had real textural problems with this version, including big lumps of flour, but some of that might have come from incorrect interpretations. The first instructions are to: “Boyle a pinte of thick Cream with sixe spoonfuls of Flower.” I added the flour when the cream was hot, in hindsight I could have done something more like a modern roux. This would mean slowly incorporating the cream into the flour as I say in the recipe instructions. There is nothing explicit like that in Cooper’s recipe, but technically, this would mean I ended up boiling the cream with the flour.
After seasoning this mix, you pour it into your bag of cloth and then the instructions seem to skip to “it being boyled, dish it.” The assumption I made was you boil this bag of pudding like you would a Christmas pudding. It is a “Hasty” pudding, so maybe 20 minutes was too long and it seemed to make the texture worse.
Overall, the taste was good - nutmeg and a bit of sweet - though if you want it like modern custard, you will need to add more sugar than I did. That said it was hard to get past the big lumps of flour.
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