Beat 3 yolks of eggs with 1 tablespoonful of sugar; add ½ cup of finely chopped suet, ½ cup of currants, ½ teaspoonful of salt and a little nutmeg. Sift 1 cup of flour with 1 heaping teaspoonful of baking-powder; mix well with the beaten whites of the eggs. Make into dumplings the size of an egg; let steam. Serve hot with lemon sauce.
A steamed suet pudding scaled down to individual dumplings. The original gives no steaming time and no yield, so both need filling in.
- Steaming timeEgg-sized dumplings of this batter need roughly 30 to 40 minutes over simmering water, covered. They are done when a skewer comes out clean and the outside is dry to the touch rather than tacky.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys; it melts slowly and leaves the crumb light rather than greasy. Butchers will often supply it on request, or use packaged shredded suet. Chill it hard before chopping, and keep the pieces small — pea-sized at most.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, the small black raisin, not fresh red or black currants. A half cup is about 2½ oz. Rinse and dry them if they are dusty, and toss them in a little of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirThe recipe reads oddly because the whites go in with the flour. Beat the whites to soft peaks and fold them and the sifted flour into the yolk mixture alternately, in two or three additions. Beating at this stage knocks out the air and gives you leaden dumplings; the baking powder alone will not rescue them.
- VesselA steamer basket over an inch or two of simmering water works, but the dumplings expand, so leave a good inch between them. Grease the basket. Keep the water at a bare simmer — a hard boil rocks them apart.
- Lemon sauceA common period treatment is a cornstarch sauce: about a cup of water thickened with a tablespoon of cornstarch, sweetened with a third of a cup of sugar, then finished off the heat with a tablespoon of butter and the juice and zest of a lemon. It should coat a spoon, not set.
- YieldAbout eight dumplings, serving four. They are best straight from the steamer; reheated, they turn dense.
Steamed suet puddings were a mainstay of English domestic sweets for most of the nineteenth century, for the practical reason that a covered pot on the stove needed no oven. Currants and nutmeg place this squarely in the plum-pudding family, of which it is essentially a small, quick, everyday cousin o no month of maturing. The addition of baking powder suggests a later version: chemical leavening reached ordinary kitchens in the second half of the century and let cooks lighten batters that had previously relied on beaten eggs and long steaming alone. Its appearance in a book that assigns one dish per day to a different nation says less about English cooking as a whole than about what a cookbook audience of the period took to be characteristically English: suet, dried fruit, and a sweet sauce poured over.