Queen Mab’s pudding

This splendid pudding is based on a recipe in Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery, published in 1845. Queen Mab was queen of the fairies to most 16th-century poets; in Romeo and Juliet she is the fairies’ midwife who gives birth to dreams; Ben Jonson, in Entertainment at Althorpe, calls her “mistris-Fairie“:

’This is Mab, the mistris-Fairie,

That doth nightly rob the dayrie;

And can hurt, or helpe the cherning,

(As shee p