Ever wondered why people keep mixing things up and calling puddings boiled when quite clearly they are steamed?
Well, it didn't always use to be that way. There is a difference between boiling and steaming a pudding, both in how it's cooked (aka, one is boiled, the other steamed), the ingredients, and the final texture of the dessert. The history behind this is fascinating.
I'm talking about puddings that are cooked on the stove, usually in a mould or basin like a Christmas Plumb Pudding. The pudding batter is bound in a basin, mould, or cloth, then cooked in a larger pot that contains
water. The amount of water and the vessel that holds the pudding determines if it is boiled or steamed.
Please note, I'm grossly oversimplifying the history here. It is so much more diverse and beautiful than I can explain in such a short post
The topic came up a few times recently in the
converting boiled and steamed puddings to pressure cooker and
the all about bread puddings threads. I thought it might be fun to have a place to talk about the history of boiled and steamed puddings and I'm secretly hoping people might share their personal experiences with how they cook these puddings today. I know a lot about the history, but I find how the traditions translate into our modern world fascinating.
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Let's go back in time to before mass manufacturing was fashionable.
We see variations of boiled puddings in most cultures in the world. They can be savoury or sweet. Some, like dumplings, aren't even wrapped in a cloth before boiling. Larger puddings, like the pluck sausage boiled in a sheep's stomach that travelled from the Middle East, via Spain, East Anglia, and eventually became the Scottish pride we love (or loath) called haggis. I adore how food traditions travel and change and one could probably spend a lifetime following the path of boiled pudding traditions around the world. But let's get closer to the dessert puddings we know and love.
As we head into early Medieval times, I'm going to focus on England as that's where my culinary history education is from.
During this time, an
oven was an unusual thing to have in the house. These are big fire hazards as the fire and looked something like a pizza oven does today. The fire would be lit in the oven and when the bricks are good and hot, the fire would be scraped out and the bread or other baked goods placed in the oven. It took a lot of fuel and was considered a big risk for burning down the town or
city where most of the closely packed houses were made of
wood.
Prior to the mid-1300s, most homes in England would have a central fire pit - a bit like a Japanese irori - and would have one large cook pot over the fire. They might also have some smaller pottery cook pots, but as pottery is sensitive to changes in temperature and still labour and resource intensive to make well at this time, these weren't used for cooking like we know it. More like how we use a slow cooker or a warming pot. If one was wealthy
enough to have access to roasting meat, it would be done in front of the fire and if one was even wealthier enough to have a second pot, it would be almost exclusively for boiling water for brewing or cleaning. Otherwise, all the cooking and heating of water for household use would be done in the same pot.
So all the main cooking was done in one giant pot shaped something like a cauldron. If we toss everything into a pot full of water, we get soup. But more often, we see people wrapping up individual dishes in cloth and cooking them together. Like puddings or even a kind of boiled pie where the filling is wrapped in a pastry crust which is then wrapped in cloth and tossed in the
hot water. This is especially useful if you are using the same pot of water for several days in a row (water wasn't easy to haul to the house and we can see in the writings of Mrs Beeton that reusing the water for several days was still common come 1850s)
What happens when we boil a pudding? When we boil something, we submerge the item in water that is at or around 100C. We usually keep this at or just below a roiling boil, so the temp of the water is quite hot. Food moves around, water moves around, but the temperature is consistant. The food loses some of the flavour to the water and what is dissolved in the water gives the flavour back to the food. Think about pasta cooked in salted vs unsalted water. It's surprising how much flavour the water can add to the pasta with just a touch of salt.
Here's a good example of what I mean by boiled pudding
Mrs Beeton's book of Household Management is an awesome text because it stands at the change between pre-industrial cooking techniques and a time when we have
cast iron stoves, crockery is now affordable to the masses, and this really crazy idea of having one heat source per pot - like a gas stove - instead of one heat source for all cooking (like a woodstove or open fire). Heck, there are even experiments with getting safe drinking water to homes. How cool is that? People don't have to haul water for long distances and this has a huge change on how people cook. (but as a side note, Mrs B is still very frugal with water recommending carrots be stuffed in a very tight saucepan so that they can't move, then covered with water - since they can't move, the simmering time is up to two hours - whereas we would boil the same amount of carrots in a large pan with lots of movement for about 10 min)
By the time we get to the Victorian period in England, we see a dramatic change in cooking styles. Especially with puddings.
Ovens are still not universal household furniture, so puddings are more often cooked on the stove. But we have a change in the cookware. Pudding basins and moulds are available to the masses as well as an overwhelming social pressure to keep up with your neighbours and it became a moral requirement to appear one step above your social
class. So if you are cooking a pudding in a cloth like poor people, you were morally inferior (wealth became considered a reward from god for a few decades around this time for being a good person - to deep dive down that rabbit hole, it starts with a book called The Self Made Man by a fellow called Smiley).
So we are cooking puddings in a basin or mould, usually pottery, and this is when steaming puddings start taking hold.
When we steam a pudding, we usually keep the basin above the water line or no more than 1/3rd up the sides of the basin. The water is usually kept at a simmer instead of a boil. There is no movement of the pudding in the water and because it is closed on all but the top (which is tied with a greased cloth), there is very little transference between the pudding and the water. The water that does get in is trapped in the pudding basin.
Steamed puddings tend to have less cooking time - dramatically less - because
steam has a lot more thermal energy than boiling water. Part of this is because of the way steam cooks and part of this is how ingredients used in these puddings changed. For savoury puddings, we now have more cooking tools easily available like frypans for browning the meat prior to adding to the pudding. So the ingredients would be pre-cooked.
Here's an example of a steamed pudding. Note how he's using a basin instead of a cloth.
As time moves on, and different cooking fats are easier to get, we move away from the hard fats like suet and towards softer fats and oils like butter in our steamed puddings. This makes a big difference in sweet puddings.
And as time moves even closer to the present day, we see puddings include rising agents and special accommodations in how we tie the cloth or parchment paper to the basin. And even more recently, a lot of people ignore putting a top on the pudding altogether.
Which is it today? Steamed or boiled?
The vernacular is difficult and as much as it would be fun to prescribe, I don't like telling people how to live their lives. In common speech, when it comes to puddings, we use boiled and steamed interchangeably in many parts of the world.
Personally, I still make a difference between boiled and steamed puddings. I find they have a very different texture and flavour. I prefer the longer boil and harder fats (also cheaper) like suet puddings. If they can dry out in storage but they tend to keep a lot longer than steamed puddings (in the late 1800s we see them keeping for 13 months or longer) but require re-boiling again. It's almost like how we hang sausages to cure and the pudding cloth acting like a sausage skin to slow the transfer of air ... but that's something I would love to explore another day.
What about modern tech like the microwave and pressure cooker?
I don't know much about the microwave so I'm going to skip past that. I had one once, but we argued and I never bothered to get it fixed.
Pressure cooking is interesting. This is steaming but at pressure. So the water vapour is hotter and it gets into the food more.
I'm still learning how to cook puddings in the pressure cooker but so far, the texture and taste are more like boiled puddings. There's a lot of greases left in the pressure cooking water at the end of the run compared to steaming a pudding.
The thing I love most about the pressure cooker is I can shave hours off the time it takes to boil or steam a pudding.
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