I can’t be the only person who’s curious every time they hear that holiday song. Though this is not exactly the modern British baked pudding full of dried fruits- for one thing, it’s not baked (hey there, broken oven!)- it keeps the spirit of the thing, and it contains figs. This week’s recipe is from the Curye on Inglysch, a collection of fourteenth-century English recipes.
Translated into understandable contemporary English, here are the ingredients:
- 4 ounces ground almonds
- ½ cup water
- ½ cup wine
- 1 cup dried figs, cut into quarters
- 1 cup raisins
- 2 tablespoons honey
- ½ teaspoon ginger
- ¼ teaspoon salt
I halved the recipe, because that’s more pudding than I need. I also honestly forgot the ginger and the salt (sorry) and only used water instead of wine. I didn’t measure the water, but it feels like I used more than is ascribed here. However, it’s pudding. I was just trying to get a reasonable consistency and I’m sure the rest boiled off.
The process is fairly simple. Grind almonds, cook on stove, add chopped figs and raisins and honey, cook until whenever. Honestly, looking at the ingredients in the saucepan, I thought “there is no way these will incorporate evenly” and I was right. It came out looking hideous. I can see why the contemporary British pudding hides all of its hideous lumpy elements within a baked outside. The sight was also reminiscent of my attempt at a raisin wine sauce in the root vegetables blog post last month. Lumpy and strange, and full of dried fruits. It’s probably not the ugliest thing I’ve made on this blog.
Even though it’s kind of ugly, the flavor is actually… good! It’s too sweet, in my opinion, but it’s dessert, so I don’t know what I expected. I think I’m learning a lot about how ancient foods (at least, of the wealthy that bothered to record elaborate recipes) contained quite a bit of sugar just like many of today’s foods. The ground almond base was actually really great- I haven’t worked with almond-based desserts at all before, but it took up the flavors of the honey and dried fruit. Overall, very sweet, a little gross looking, but with good flavors (even my parents admitted it was decent!).
Here is the link to the recipe source for this week:
http://www.godecookery.com/friends/frec137.html