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Suet Pudding
Take one teacupful of chopped suet, one of sour milk, one of molasses; also a teaspoonful of saleratus. Add flour to make it stiff. Use one teacupful of raisins, one of currants, one teaspoonful of each kind of spice, and three eggs. Boil three hours.
A plain boiled pudding of the sort that filled out a winter dinner: batter, dried fruit, and beef suet, tied in a cloth or packed in a basin and set over water for three hours. Nothing here is difficult, but the units and two of the ingredients need translating.
- The teacupfulA period teacup is not a measuring cup. Six fluid ounces (3/4 cup) is the usual reading, and using it consistently for the suet, sour milk, molasses, raisins and currants keeps the proportions right. If you prefer a full cup throughout, the pudding still works; just do not mix the two.
- SaleratusSaleratus is an early bicarbonate (potassium bicarbonate in earlier use, sodium bicarbonate later); treat it as baking soda. One teaspoon is reasonable here because it is reacting with the acid in the sour milk, which supplies most of the lift, the three eggs the rest.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk. Use buttermilk, or stir a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar into 3/4 cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes. Without the acid the soda has nothing to work against and the pudding will taste soapy.
- SuetBeef kidney suet, shredded or chopped fine and kept cold; ask a butcher, or use packaged shredded suet. Frozen butter grated on the coarse side of a box grater is one common substitute, though it may give a denser crumb.
- "Flour to make it stiff"Expect roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups of all-purpose flour. You want a thick batter that drops heavily from the spoon, not a dough — stiff enough to hold the fruit in suspension rather than letting it sink.
- "Each kind of spice"The recipe does not say which spices; cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and allspice are the likely candidates. A teaspoon of each is a lot by modern taste; half a teaspoon of cloves and allspice with a full teaspoon of cinnamon and nutmeg is closer to what most people want now.
- How to boil itFill a greased 2-quart pudding basin or heatproof bowl two-thirds full, cover with pleated parchment and foil, tie it down, and set it on a rack in a pot with water halfway up the sides. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up with boiling water as it falls — if the pot runs dry the pudding scorches and the basin cracks.
- Doneness and yieldThree hours is right for this volume; a skewer to the centre should come out clean and the pudding should feel springy. It serves eight, and wants a hard sauce, warm custard or lemon sauce, since the pudding itself is only as sweet as its molasses.
Boiled suet puddings are the direct descendants of the English pudding cloth, which by the seventeenth century had freed cooks from stuffing batter into an animal's gut and made a boiled sweet possible in any household with a kettle. This American version shows what the nineteenth-century pantry had to work with: molasses instead of sugar, sour milk kept from the day before, saleratus rather than commercial baking powder, and raisins and currants as the only fruit reliably available in midwinter. Suet was cheap, kept well in cold weather, and gave a moist crumb without butter, which was worth money.