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Apple Puddings (mother's)
Roll out two pounds of crust of good suet or dripping (see CRUST SUET FOR PUDDINGS), and let it be thicker in the middle than at the edges. Fill it with layers consisting of four table-spoonfuls of sliced apples, one tea-spoonful of finely-shred suet and one table-spoonful of currants. When full, fold it over, tie it in a well-floured cloth, boil, and serve with sweet sauce. Time to boil, two hours. Sufficient for six persons. Probable cost, 1s.
A boiled suet pudding of the plainest kind, and the whole thing hangs on the cloth: it must be floured well enough to seal, and the water must never stop boiling or the crust takes up water and turns sodden.
- The crust"Two pounds of crust" reads as two pounds of finished suet pastry, not two pounds of flour. Suet crust is commonly made at around 2 parts flour to 1 part shredded suet by weight with cold water to bind, so something like 1 lb flour and 8 oz suet, plus the water, will bring you to about two pounds of dough.
- SuetBeef suet, shredded and usually dredged in flour so it stays separate. Packaged shredded suet, beef or vegetable, works as sold. Frozen grated butter gives a lighter, less traditional crust; dripping, as the recipe allows, gives a savoury edge some will not want with apples.
- The layering is per layer, not totalFour tablespoons of apple, a teaspoon of suet and a tablespoon of currants is one round, repeated until the crust is full. Expect something like 1.5 to 2 lb of apples for a pudding this size. Use a firm cooking apple such as Bramley or Granny Smith.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, the small black raisins, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Rinse and dry them if they are dusty.
- Boiling in a clothScald the cloth, wring it out, and flour the damp side heavily; the flour forms the seal. Tie it loosely enough for the crust to swell, lower into water already at a rolling boil, and top up with boiling water so it never drops off the boil. Sitting the pudding on an upturned saucer or a trivet stops the base scorching.
- Or use a basinA greased pudding basin big enough for the crust and filling, nearer 3 pints than 2, lined with the crust, covered with pleated parchment and foil and steamed, is more forgiving than a cloth. Steaming will likely need at least the two hours given, and possibly longer.
- Sweet sauceThe book means a plain sweet white sauce or a melted-butter sauce flavoured with sugar and nutmeg or a little brandy. Custard or thin cream serves the same purpose.
- Yield and costSix portions, and generous ones. The "probable cost, 1s" is a Victorian household budgeting note, not a modern figure.
Boiled suet puddings tied in a floured cloth were the backbone of English cooking from the seventeenth century onward, and the technique survived well past the point when ovens had become common, because it needed nothing but a pot and a fire. Cassell's, a large late-Victorian household dictionary aimed squarely at middle-class housekeepers and their cooks, gives many variations on the form, distinguished only by filling. The apple-and-currant combination is older than the recipe: dried currants were a cheap imported sweetener in English kitchens long before cane sugar was affordable in quantity, and they turn up alongside apples in pies and puddings from the medieval period on. The printed cost of a shilling, and the note that it feeds six, reflect the book's standing habit of costing every dish so a household could plan against a weekly budget.