There’s a piece floating around the interwebs where someone cooks, then rates the puddings from Edmond's cookbook and the puddings don’t come off so well. There is snark and derision. Plenty of it. While we’re not suggesting that some of the original Edmonds puddings aren’t hefty and pretty out of whack with how we cook today, it helps to understand that heavy puddings represent a whole other time in culinary history. A little context doesn’t go amiss. Back in the heyday of leaden puddings, more people lived off the land, worked hard, and ate smaller portions of protein for dinner. A pudding was a necessary fill-you-up part of the evening meal deal and, at a time when the range of available ingredients was way more limited than it is today, people cooked with an awful lot of custard powder, golden syrup, suet and other fortifying – and affordable – basics. We’re being polite. There was a helluva lot of stodge in decades past, and loads of housewives with the free afternoons required to make puddings like this classic steamed one. Oh and they also possessed the ability to decipher recipes, which were agonisingly short on critical detail (absent basin, tin or baking dish sizes, no cooking temperatures or times…). If you’ve never cooked a steamed pudding, you’ll need a proper pudding basin (with a tight-sealing lid), a big appetite, and an appreciation of left-overs because unless you assemble a hungry crowd, you’ll have some. Let the custard free-flow!

SERVES 6-8

60ml (¼ cup) golden syrup

175g unsalted butter, softened, plus extra for greasing

175g brown sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

3 large (55g) eggs 

200g (1⅓  cups) self-raising flour, plus extra for dusting

50g (½ cup) desiccated coconut

2 tbsp milk

custard or whipped cream, to serve

Lightly grease and flour a 1.75litre (5 cup)-capacity pudding basin then pour in the golden syrup. 

Using an electric mixer or hand-held electric beaters, cream the butter and brown sugar until light and fluffy, then add the vanilla. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, beating well between each.  Add the flour, coconut and milk to the creamed mixture, stirring well to just combine. Spoon the mixture into the basin. Cover tightly with a lid, or , several layers of aluminium foil secured tightly with kitchen string. Cook the pudding, covered, in a large saucepan filled with enough boiling water to come half-way up the side of the  pudding basin, for 1 hour 20 minutes or until a cake tester inserted into the centre  of the pudding withdraws clean; top up the water level occasionally if needed..  Serve the pudding warm with custard or cream passed separately.