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Grandma Thomson's White Pudding
Weigh equal quantities of best beef suet and sifted flour, shave down suet and rub into fine particles with the hands, removing all tough and stringy parts, mix well with the flour, season very highly with pepper, salt to taste, stuff loosely in beef-skins (entrails. cleansed like pork-skins for sausage), half a yard or less in length, secure the ends, prick every two or three inches with a darning-- needle, place to boil in a kettle of cold water hung on the crane; boil three hours, place on table until cold, after which hang up in a cool place to dry; tie up in a clean cotton bag, and put away where it it will be both dry and cool. When wanted for use, cut off the quantity needed, boil in hot water until heated through, take out and place before the fire to dry off and "crisp." The above was considered an “extra" dish at all the "flax scutchings," "quilting frolics," and "log rollings" of a hundred years ago. The same by measure is as follows: One pint best beef suet to two pints flour; mix thoroughly, season very highly with pepper and salt, sew up little sacks of cotton cloth half a yard long and three inches wide, fill nearly full, put to boil in hot water, boil from four to six hours; when done, take out, drain, let cool, hang in a dry, cool place, and when wanted for table, cut off as much as needed, put on hot water, boil until cooked through, take out, peel off cloth, put in a pie-pan, set in oven to dry and brown. -Mrs. E. T. Carson, Mt. Pleasant Farm.
A frontier keeping-food: seasoned suet and flour boiled in casings or cloth, hung to dry, then reheated and crisped as needed. The two versions given are not the same pudding, and that is the first thing to sort out.
- The two proportions differEqual quantities by weight is roughly half suet, half flour. One pint of shredded suet to two pints of flour is closer to 8 oz suet to about 18 oz flour, a far leaner, starchier pudding. Choose one and expect a different result from the other.
- Suet"Best beef suet" is the hard kidney fat, which a butcher will still supply on request; packaged shredded suet also works. Keep it cold and grate rather than chop, and pick out every membrane and string as directed, or the pudding will be chewy in patches.
- Beef-skinsThese are beef intestines, cleaned as for sausage. Buy prepared beef middles or hog casings from a butcher or sausage supplier and rinse and soak them; cleaning raw entrails at home is not worth attempting. Half a yard is about 18 inches.
- Stuff loosely and prickThis is the hinge. Flour swells as it boils, and a tightly packed casing will split. The recipe says to stuff the casings loosely (the cloth bags it fills 'nearly full'), and to keep the pricking at two- to three-inch intervals.
- A cold-water start on the craneThe crane swung a kettle over the hearth fire, so the water heated slowly with the pudding in it. In a modern pot, start the cased puddings in cold water and bring them up gently, then hold at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil for the three hours; hard boiling bursts casings and cloth alike.
- The cloth versionScald the cotton bags and dust the inside with flour before filling, which keeps the pudding from sticking when you peel the cloth away. Four to six hours is right for a bag three inches thick.
- StorageThe recipe asks only for a dry, cool place, which in practice meant an unheated pantry or cellar. Refrigerate or freeze instead; a cooked, moist suet pudding left at room temperature for days is a spoilage risk, not a preserved food.
- CrispingReheat the cut length in simmering water until hot through, then finish in a hot oven until the outside browns and firms; the recipe gives no temperature or time, only 'set in oven to dry and brown'. A hot skillet with a little of its own fat does the same job faster.
White pudding is the pale sibling of black pudding: the same casing, the same suet, but no blood, the bulk carried by grain -- oatmeal in the Scots and Irish versions, flour in this one. Emigrant households from Britain and Ireland brought the form to the American backcountry, where flour and beef fat were both easier to come by than blood at the right moment. The recipe arrives as a contributed household receipt credited to Mrs. E. T. Carson of Mt. Pleasant Farm, and the text itself dates the custom rather than the method, calling the dish an "extra" at the gatherings "of a hundred years ago." The setting is the point of the note. Flax scutchings, quilting frolics and log rollings were cooperative work gatherings that ended in a shared meal, and a pudding that could be made in quantity, hung to keep, and then sliced and crisped as guests arrived was exactly the dish for feeding a crowd of neighbors on short notice.