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Steamed Pudding
Take one cupful of suet, chopped very fine, and one cupful of molasses, one cupful of sour milk, one teaspoonful of cinnamon, half a teaspoonful of cloves, one teaspoonful of soda; beat up three eggs, one cupful of chopped raisins, four cupfuls of flour. Steam two hours. Eat with sugar and butter, or sugar and milk.
A plain boiled-pudding batter of the sort that was standing kitchen currency in 1900: suet for fat, molasses for sweetness, sour milk and soda for lift. Everything hinges on steady, gentle steam for the full two hours.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold by butchers and often available frozen and shredded. One cupful chopped fine is roughly 5 oz. Vegetable shredded suet works; butter does not behave the same way, since suet melts later and leaves the crumb open.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and acidic, not spoiled pasteurised milk. Use buttermilk cup for cup, or a cup of milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes. The acid is what the soda reacts with.
- SodaBaking soda. Books of this era sometimes call instead for 'saleratus,' a related leavening (originally potassium bicarbonate) used in much the same way. One teaspoon against one cup of sour milk and one of molasses is in proportion; sifting it with the flour rather than stirring it into the wet mix helps it keep its lift.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will dominate. Light or medium molasses gives the mild brown sweetness intended.
- Four cupfuls of flourThat is a stiff batter by modern standards, close to a dough you spoon rather than pour. If it will not drop from the spoon at all, add sour milk a tablespoon at a time; the flour of the period may also have been softer than modern all-purpose or bread flour.
- The mould and the steamGrease a pudding basin or covered mould large enough that the batter fills it no more than two-thirds, and cover tightly with a lid or with buttered parchment and foil tied down. Set it on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water halfway up the sides, lid on, and keep the water at a bare simmer, topping up with boiling water so it never runs dry.
- DonenessAfter two hours a skewer to the centre should come out clean and the pudding should feel springy. Understeaming leaves a wet seam in the middle; it will not correct itself out of the pot, so return it to the steam for another twenty minutes if in doubt.
- Sauce and yield"Sugar and butter" most likely means hard sauce: creamed butter with about twice its volume of sifted sugar, chilled, so it melts over the hot slices, though the recipe says no more than the two words. "Sugar and milk" is the thriftier version, sweetened milk poured over. The pudding serves eight to ten, and reheats well by steaming a further half hour.
Steamed suet puddings crossed to American kitchens from British practice and stayed useful long after cake ovens became reliable, because they cook over a single burner and forgive an unpredictable stove. This version belongs to a family of molasses-and-sour-milk puddings built largely from what a household kept on hand: suet, molasses, milk that had turned, and raisins. The sour milk suits a pre-refrigeration kitchen, where souring was an expected stage in milk's life rather than a fault, and cooks planned recipes to use it up.