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Steamed Bread Pudding
One quart of light bread dough, two-thirds of a cup of chopped suet, one cupful chopped raisins; steam in a buttered pan with a tube in the center, about one hour. Serve with a rich sauce.
A thrifty pudding built on risen bread dough rather than a batter, which makes it closer to a steamed yeast cake than to the custardy bread puddings we know now. Almost everything that can go wrong here is a matter of proofing and steam.
- The hinge: let it rise before it steamsThe dough is a leavened one, and kneading in suet and raisins knocks the gas out of it. Set the filled pan in a warm place until the dough has visibly swelled, roughly half again in bulk, before it goes over the water. Steamed straight from mixing it comes out dense and gummy.
- "One quart of light bread dough"Dough was often measured by volume in kitchens that kept a batch going. A quart of risen white bread dough is perhaps 1 to 1 3/4 lb, depending on how far it has risen. Any plain white loaf dough works, made or bought; skip anything enriched with a lot of sugar, which will brown oddly in steam.
- SuetBeef kidney fat, sold shredded in the UK and available frozen or from a butcher elsewhere. Chop or grate it fine and cold so it disperses. Frozen grated butter is a common modern stand-in, though it gives a softer, less springy crumb than suet does.
- The tube panA buttered tube or ring mould conducts heat to the middle and stops a raw core. A metal tube pan of about 2 quarts, a kugelhopf mould or an angel-food pan with a removable base all serve; leave room for the dough to rise. Butter it heavily and dust with flour or fine crumbs.
- Setting up the steamerCover the pan with buttered foil or a cloth tied down, set it on a rack in a deep pot over an inch or two of simmering water, and lid the pot. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up with boiling water as it goes; a dry pot scorches the pudding in minutes.
- Time and donenessOne hour is optimistic for a full quart of dough. Reckon on 1 1/2 hours and test: a skewer should come out clean and the centre should read about 200F. Undercooked yeast dough in the middle is the common failure.
- "A rich sauce"Period sauces of this kind included hard sauce (butter creamed with sugar and a spirit), a vanilla or lemon pudding sauce thickened with cornstarch, or a foamy egg sauce. Something sharp and pourable suits it best, since the pudding itself is barely sweet.
- Yield and keepingServes six to eight. It reheats well and is arguably better the second day: steam slices for a few minutes, or warm them covered in a low oven.
Puddings made from a piece of the day's bread dough belong to a long line of household economy, running back through English suet puddings boiled in a cloth to the practice of holding back dough from the weekly bake for something sweet. Suet was the ordinary pudding fat in Britain and North America well into the twentieth century, cheap, firm at room temperature, and prized for the light open crumb it gives as it melts and leaves steam pockets behind. The tube pan may hint at the period, though it fixes nothing on its own: by the late nineteenth century American kitchens were well supplied with tinned moulds, and the older cloth-tied pudding bag was giving way to shaped metal that turned out a neat ring for the table. The recipe assumes what most of its readers had on hand, a bowl of light dough rising by the stove, and gives no sauce recipe at all.