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STEAK PUDDING
Mix one quart flour, one pound suet (shredded fine), a little salt, and cold water to make stiff as for pie-crust, roll out half an inch thick; have steak (beef or mutton) well seasoned with pepper and salt, lay them on the paste and roll it up, tie in a cloth, and boil three hours. Some add a few oysters and a sliced onion to the steak.
A suet crust rolled around seasoned steak and boiled in a cloth — the American cousin of the English beefsteak roly-poly. The original assumes you own a pudding cloth and a pot deep enough to keep it covered for three hours.
- The hinge: the water must never stop boilingIf the pot goes off the boil or runs low, the suet crust turns grey and sodden instead of setting. Keep it at a steady rolling boil and top up with boiling water, never cold.
- A quart of flourRoughly 4 to 4 1/2 cups, about 1 lb 2 oz (500 g), measured by dipping and levelling rather than sifted. "Cold water to make stiff as for pie-crust" will be somewhere near 1 to 1 1/4 cups.
- The suet is heavy by modern standardsA pound of suet to a quart of flour is close to equal weights. Standard suet crust is two parts flour to one part fat, so 8 oz (225 g) gives a lighter, less greasy pastry. Ask a butcher for beef kidney fat, or use packaged shredded suet; the vegetable versions behave the same way.
- No raising agentBuckeye's crust relies on suet alone, which gives a dense, close pastry. Two teaspoons of baking powder stirred into the flour, or self-rising flour, produces the puffier crust most people now expect from a steamed pudding.
- The cloth, and the alternativeA pudding cloth is scalded, floured on the inside, wrapped around the roll and tied at both ends with string, leaving room to swell. If you would rather not, wrap the roll in parchment and then foil, pleated across the middle, and steam it on a rack above simmering water for the same three hours.
- Cut the steak smallChuck or shin cut into 1/2-inch pieces cooks evenly and tender in three hours; larger pieces cook less evenly, though three hours of moist heat will still soften them. "Well seasoned with pepper and salt" is nearly the whole of the seasoning here, aside from the optional onion -- a spoonful of flour tossed with the meat thickens the juices into gravy inside the crust.
- The oystersAdded at the start, they will be very soft after three hours. If you want recognisable oysters, they are better served alongside.
- YieldSix generous portions. Slice the roll across in thick rounds and serve with the gravy that gathers inside the crust.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (first published in the 1870s, compiled under Estelle Woods Wilcox) turns a small quantity of tough steak stretched with a quart of flour into dinner for a household. The form is English -- the beefsteak pudding and its sweet sibling the jam roly-poly were boiled in a floured cloth long before basins and greaseproof paper made steaming tidy -- and the oysters-with-beef pairing that the recipe offers as an option was ordinary rather than luxurious in the nineteenth century, when oysters were cheap and shipped inland in barrels. Suet crust survived in American cookbooks well into the era of the coal range because it needed no oven: a pot of boiling water, kept boiling, did the whole job.