What’s For Pud? Figgy-dowdy!
We’ll rant and we’ll roar like true British sailors,
We’ll range and we’ll roam over all the salt seas,
Until we strike soundings in the Channel of old England:
From Ushant to Scilly ’tis thirty-five leagues.
— traditional sea shanty, as sung by the crew of the HMS Polychrest
For this post, in honor of St. George’s Day and Sam and Monkey Gland’s inspired food blogging event, What’s For Pud, Belly Timber takes to the high seas.
Or, to be more precise, Belly Timber takes to the English Channel, and to a rather peculiar double-ended boat and its famous captain, Lucky Jack Aubrey.
What’s What’s For Pud, you ask, and what the devil does it have to do with sailors?
Exactly this: What’s For Pud is a celebration of English ‘afters’ — pud, pudding, biscuits, sweets — those sticky sweet, scrumptious dishes that prove wrong all the naysayers who turn their noses up at quintessential English cuisine. And we here at Belly Timber, being rather nautically inclined to begin with, believe that nowhere else can one find dishes more quintessentially English than aboard the great ships of the British Navy during the Golden Age of Sail.
Because, as we know, meals aboard Lord Nelson’s fleet were all about two glorious things: Rum and suet.
Yes, I did indeed say suet.
And nice big bottles o’ rum, by gum.
Which brings us to our splendid St. George’s Day dish: Figgy-dowdy.
First, a brief confession: Chopper and I read out loud to each other at bedtime. So, when I say we read Patrick O’Brian’s Post Captain
Partway through Post Captain, I scoured the web for Aubrey/Maturin related books and discovered this one: Lobscouse and Spotted Dog: Which It’s a Gastronomic Companion to the Aubrey/Maturin Novels.
Also partway through Post Captain, we ran across this delicious scene in which Jack Aubrey and several of his officers explain figgy-dowdy to a dinner guest aboard the Polychrest.
‘Now, sir,’ said Jack to Canning, ‘we have a Navy dish that I thought might amuse you. We call it figgy-dowdy. You do not have to eat it unless you choose — this is Liberty Hall. For my part, I find it settles a meal; but perhaps it is an acquired taste.’
Canning eyed the pale, amorphous, gleaming, slightly translucent mass and asked how it was made; he did not think he had ever seen anything quite like it.
‘We take ship’s biscuit, put it in a stout canvas bag –’ said Jack.
‘Pound it with a marlin-spike for half an hour –’ said Pullings.
‘Add bits of pork fat, plums, figs, rum, currants,’ said Parker.
‘Send it to the galley, and serve it up with bosun’s grog,’ said Macdonald.
— Patrick O’Brian, Post Captain
And because we’re not the most, shall we say, sensible lot in the kitchen, we immediately determined that we just had to try it out for ourselves.
Now, if you follow the link to the BBC website, you’ll notice the Lobscouse recipe for figgy-dowdy is slightly different than the one in Post Captain, though both follow the same pattern: cram a bunch of stuff in a bag with fat and rum and boil it.
Patrick O’Brian himself speaks highly of this style of pud. “Second only to that of Christmas,” he says in a short piece titled Thoughts on Pudding, “we find a series of others, all founded upon that happy marriage of flour (two parts), suet (one part) and sugar consummated in a cloth or basin surrounded by boiling water.”
For our part, we took bits from both recipes: pork fat rather than the hard-to-find traditional suet, and flour instead of ship’s biscuit (even though I do seem to recall seeing a marlin-spike somewhere in the tool shed).
For the add-ins, Chopper included raisins, currents, figs (naturally), and for the spices, ginger and pumpkin pie spice.
As for the rum and water, well the Lobscouse recipe (which we halved) didn’t call for much, and at first the dough refused to stick together. ‘Are you going to add more water?’ I cried. ‘Why no,’ Chopper said. ‘I’m going to add more rum! Ha ha!’ And thus he did. Quite a lot of it, I think.
And so, with a full bottle of rum handy (just in case), and with much fear in his heart, Chopper set to work.
Yes, fear. Because, well, dessert. With pork fat. How can a Yank raised on cobbler and cookies not have fear in his heart?
But, here’s the thing…
Around the mid point of the boiling process, we noticed a shift in the odors from the pot. They weren’t quite so porky anymore. They were spicy. And rummy. And quite tantalizing. And we started to wonder if figgy-dowdy might actually taste good.
Now, the scary part, aside from just knowing that this is a dessert with pork fat in it (do I need to repeat myself? PORK FAT. IN A DESSERT. Okay, done) is that fact that it is, as Patrick O’Brian described, a “pale, amorphous, gleaming, slightly translucent mass.”
In a word, ick. In several words? It looks rather like something that hasn’t been born yet.
Fortunately for our appetites, our figgy-dowdy wasn’t quite as pale and translucent as I’d expected (no doubt due to the copious amounts of dark rum Chopper poured into the mix), so we ventured further.
In fact, when we sliced it open, it looked rather good. Like rum cake.
So, after a quick photo session (that included an attempted assault on the figgy-dowdy by both Villeneuve and a rather menacing crew of pirates) we sampled our pud.
And our pud was good.
A bit chewy perhaps, and slightly dry in the middle — something easily remedied by packing the cheesecloth a little less tightly or, of course, more rum — but damn if it wasn’t a pretty tasty shipboard treat. Call me crazy, but I think we may have to dine like British sailors more often!
We hove our ship to when the wind was south-west, boys,
We hove our ship to for to strike soundings clear,
Then we filled our main-topsail and bore right away, boys,
And right up the Channel our course we did steer.
Tagged with: What’s For Pud? and St George’s Day
April 24th, 2006 at 1:40 am
Who needs to drink to be jolly and drown melancholy when you have a pudding full of rum? I’ll just take your word on the pork fat.
April 24th, 2006 at 5:21 am
I don’t see how pork fat is any more strange than beef fat. Maybe, with your substitution in mind, I’ll tackle some of the more rigorous British puddings this fall and winter! Roly-poly and spotted dick, here I come. ;-)
I’m already a big fan of the steamed/boiled pudding genre. I own a pudding mold, and everyone expects date pudding from me around the holidays.
April 24th, 2006 at 9:14 am
Kimberly, exactly. Very full of rum!
Hey Jamie, around these parts (having grown up with dessert = Jell-o or ice cream or the occasional pie) any kind of animal fat in a dessert is just plain weird! Of course we’ve all read about those rigorous British puds numerous times, but neither my family nor Chopper’s family ever ventured past traditional American fare, so this little excursion was quite the eye-opener. I think we may have to try spotted dick next as well!
April 24th, 2006 at 9:21 am
From my experience and yours, it seems these English puds certainly taste better than they look. I certainly don’t have a problem with pork fat, or suet for that matter, but that is one scary looking critter before you sliced into it. “It looks rather like something that hasn’t been born yet” made me nearly cry with laughter.
April 24th, 2006 at 11:14 am
Yes, something that looks like a face-hugger should hatch out of it isn’t going to win any points for aesthetics…
Chopper tells me he took one of our extras (we made four) to work last night and served it up to his coworkers with warm butter. It was a huge hit and the butter remedied the dry-in-the-middle problem quite nicely.
I’m not sure if he told everyone about the pork fat, or mentioned suet. We always figured suet is what you put out for the birds in winter. Lucky birds. Clearly, we didn’t know what we were missing!
April 24th, 2006 at 11:26 am
You mention pie - doesn’t the best pie crust always use lard? There’s some animal fat for you. :^) And bizcochitos, the state cookie of New Mexico, traditionally have lard in them. But yeah, this recipe sounds a bit odd on the face of it - not sure I’d be brave enough to try it on my own! Thanks for ‘testing the waters’ for us :^)
April 24th, 2006 at 12:46 pm
So glad to find an unusual pud - the name is great and it sounds tasty … and I’ve got a whole bottle of rum to use up from my own pudding efforts! :)
April 24th, 2006 at 1:00 pm
Yes, there! I think I see it. A primitive optic vesicle. Tasty!
How very brave of you and how appropriate, given your penchant(s) for pirate-y things.
April 24th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
Crisco, Tricia, crisco. Don’t you know your traditional late 20th Century American cuisine? :-P
Seriously though, Chopper and I were just discussing this and came to the realization that the squick factor revolving around suet in dessert is due in large part to the way we were both raised.
Here’s the thing: Here in the Northwest, in your average whitebread middle-class American family in the latter half of the 20th century, unless you were raised on a farm or by parents with non-American culinary sensibilities, you were taught from day one that Animal Fat Is Bad. This meant margarine instead of butter, Crisco instead of lard, and please cut all the fat off your bacon and don’t you dare eat the skin on that turkey!
It takes a fair amount of effort and deliberate re-education to get past that particular culinary nightmare, and we work in steps. First we had to convince ourselves weren’t going to do ourselves in by buying butter. Next, Chopper had to introduce blocks of lard to the pantry, and after that came the rendering of duck fat for confit.
Now, at long last, we’ve taken the next step: toward unrendered fat in desserts. Fat with the fleshy bits on it — which is, in our myopic worldview, a whole different animal (ball of wax? Can of worms?) than just plain old lard. I mean, fleshy bits!! Eeek!
See, we work at it. We get there eventually. (Next stop, monkey brains! Or…. maybe not.)
Alex, if I recall, Chopper used at least half a bottle. Though I’m not entirely sure how much that disappeared from the bottle actually went into the pud!
Cookiecrumb, damn you. You made me do a google image search for appropriately similar optic vesicles. And here I was going to have leftover figgy-dowdy for lunch!
As for pirate-y things, hell, we’re just getting started. Look what I picked out to do on my birthday this year! Arrrrrrr!
April 24th, 2006 at 3:46 pm
Oh, that’s fun. We did that once, in Key West. Unbelievably fun. I think I helped “move a rope.” (Nautical parlance.)
Yo-ho-ho, and a whole lot of rummy figgy-dowdy!
April 24th, 2006 at 5:14 pm
My word. Who’d have thought that something so unprepossessing fresh out of the pot would have such a beautiful, rum-cake-like crumb?
This was an unmitigated lark to read. Such a brave and delightful thing you did here, mrs D.
April 25th, 2006 at 6:04 am
Miz D,
“Yes, fear. Because, well, dessert. With pork fat. How can a Yank raised on cobbler and cookies not have fear in his heart?”
How could anyone be afraid of pork fat?
April 25th, 2006 at 11:23 am
CC: I’m hoping I get to help splice the jib scupper, whatever the hell that means.
Thank you, Bakerina! Yes, we never would have thought it either. Really, this turned out quite good — I’d serve it to guests just to see their looks of horror transform into looks of delight.
Kevin, you kidder, you. Fleshy bits, my dear, fleshy bits.
April 25th, 2006 at 11:12 pm
Mrs Deedop and Chopper.
You have made me chuckle on the darkest of days and for that I can do nothing less than thank you from the bottom of my heart.
xx
two english kisses for you, one each
April 26th, 2006 at 9:33 pm
Aw, thanks, Sam! Here’s to brighter days ahead!
xxox
April 27th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
Ahoy mateys!
Hearts of oak are our ships, jolly tars are our men,
We always are ready, steady, boys, steady,
To fight and to conquer again and again.
As taught to me at Kings College School, Wimbledon many years ago…
…and where we were also served spotted dick and custard once a week - or sometimes treacle pudding.
Other suety desserts enjoyed with plenty of suet: christmas pudding (including silver sixpence), mince pies, sussex pond pudding, queen of puddings, etc.
Queen of puddings is my favorite - I have made that many a time on request for dinner parties.
But never a figgy-dowdy. It is clear that more runm is needed but otherwise I expect the recipe above is perfect. Pork fat will substitute for suet for me, too.
April 27th, 2006 at 2:26 pm
You two are a delight! Not an once of fear in your bones–or at least not enough to keep you from tackling projects that might make a less enterprising twosome jump ship. Excellent fun. I am still laughing over the “something that hasn’t yet been born” line. Thanks for the adventure!
April 29th, 2006 at 11:42 pm
Queen of puddings! I’ll have to check that out just because of the name. Next up, we’ll need to podcast all these puds with sea shanty singing in the background, eh?
You’re welcome, Tea! I can’t say we didn’t have an ounce of fear, though. We just got over it eventually! :-)
December 23rd, 2006 at 9:03 pm
thanks for the very injoyabe experience.
My father use to make real Mincemeat and yes it is made with suet and lots of brandy, I have continued his work of suppling my family and friends with real mincemeat. And yes it was quit a challenge to find the suet, but I live in oregon and found a real butcher shop, and they are very willing to supply me with the suet. Susann
February 12th, 2007 at 5:47 am
My wife and I regularly drive from the Chicago suburbs where we live to central Wisconsin where our parents live. On the drive, I read to her, and have lately been reading the Aubrey-Maturin novels. She was interested in some of the food mentioned, so I made her a plum duff (using vegetable shortening in place of lard). She really liked it.
I am going to make a figgy dowdy fairly soon, and the lobscouse sounds interesting.
March 17th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Figgy Dowdy is the name of an antiquated pagan well on Carn Marth Hill, in the Duchy of Cornwall and noted for its reviving properties and I guess others have already commented on the Holy Bucket song lyrics which extoll the virtues of the puddings for cure all;.