The Pudding Cloth

When people wanted to have their favourite puddings and sausages more often, they searched for an alternative vessel to cook them in. Until recently, historians believed that the first mention of a pudding cloth appeared in Gervase Markham’s oatmeal section of his fabulous book The English Huswife in 1615. However, it has come to light, in one of the last works of historian Constance Hieatt, that there was an earlier mention in A Miscellany of Household Information, which was compiled more than a hundred years earlier, in 1485. The recipe is for a boiled fish pudding for Lent, and uses cod, salmon, currants, salt and saffron.