Hot Puddings

‘Blessed be he that invented pudding, for it is a Manna that hits the Palates of all Sortes of People,’ wrote Monsieur M. Misson in his Memoirs on his visit to London at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Sugar had been a luxury too expensive for many until the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the price dropped to about 6d. per pound. Once it had done so, the practice of ‘scraping’ the conical sugar-loaf over the crust of a pie and of supplementing sugar in the contents with raisins, was enlarged to a fuller use of sugar in pies and tarts and to its use with ‘flower’ to make puddings.