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Boiled Suet Pudding
1 cup New Orleans Mo- 1 cup sour Milk, lasses, 1 heaping teaspoonful The Great 1 pinch of Salt, 1 cup picked beef Suet, "Arm & Hammer" Soda. 1 cup Flour, 1 cup seeded Raisins.
Mix together the molasses, sour milk, Soda and salt. Chop the picked beef suet very fine with the flour. Add this with the raisins to the liquid and then add more flour to make a rather stiff batter.
Fill into a deep pudding mould or Boston Brown Bread pan, well greased and dusted with flour. Place in a double boiler and boil for three or four hours. Serve with whipped cream. 1 cup Flour,
A steamed molasses-and-suet pudding of the plain New England type, leavened by the reaction between sour milk, molasses and soda. The method is straightforward; the details that matter are the fat, the acid and the covered mould.
- The hinge: cover the mouldThe batter goes into a greased, floured mould that must be covered tightly with a lid or with foil tied down, then set in a pot of simmering water. Uncovered, condensation drips in and the top turns to paste.
- "Boil" means steamDespite the wording, the pudding is not boiled in water. Water in the lower pot should be kept at a bare simmer, coming about halfway up the mould, and topped up with boiling water as it evaporates so the pot never runs dry.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, mildly acidic. Substitute buttermilk cup for cup, or add a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar to a cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes. The acid is structural here, not a flavour note: it is what the soda reacts with.
- Beef suet"Picked" suet is the hard kidney fat with membrane and gristle removed. Ask a butcher, or use packaged shredded suet. Chopping it with the flour, as directed, keeps the pieces separate; freezing the suet and grating it is easier and gives the same result. Vegetable suet or frozen grated butter will work, with a slightly softer crumb.
- MolassesNew Orleans molasses was generally reckoned a lighter, better-flavoured grade than West Indies molasses. Use unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will dominate.
- SodaA heaping teaspoon of baking soda against one cup each of molasses and sour milk is in line with period practice. Too much soda will make the pudding taste soapy and darken it.
- Filling the mouldFill no more than two-thirds full; the batter rises considerably.
- Timing and donenessThe recipe allows three to four hours. A skewer into the centre should come out clean and the pudding should pull slightly from the sides. Let it stand ten minutes before turning out.
- YieldServes six to eight. It reheats well by steaming for twenty minutes, and traditionally is served warm with whipped cream or a hard sauce.
Steamed suet puddings were the everyday sweet of nineteenth-century New England and Britain alike: cheap fat, cheap sweetener, a long unattended cook. Molasses did the work of sugar in American households well into the twentieth century, and the pairing of molasses with sour milk and soda is the same chemistry behind Boston brown bread; the recipe offers a brown bread pan simply as an alternative mould. This one appears in a baking soda company's booklet for an obvious reason: such pamphlets were distributed free to demonstrate the product, and a pudding that fails without soda makes the point better than an advertisement. The suet itself was a byproduct any household buying beef would have on hand, which is why it turns up in sweet dishes at all.