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Baroness Pudding
Remove all skins from a quarter of a pound of suet, and chop it very finely, stone six ounces of raisins, and cut them each into four pieces. Mix half a tea-spoonful of salt with six ounces of flour and rub the suet into it, add the raisins, and stir in a quarter of a pint of milk. Beat the pudding well for a few minutes, then put it in a well-buttered mould, tie it up in a floured cloth, and boil for four and a half hours. Turn it out carefully on to a hot dish, and sift pounded sugar on to it before sending to table. Probable cost, 1s.
A plain boiled suet pudding of the simplest kind — flour, suet, raisins, milk, salt — and the whole thing depends on the water never stopping its boil for four and a half hours.
- Keep the water boiling and topped upThe pudding must stay fully submerged in water at a steady boil for the entire time; add boiling water from a kettle as it evaporates. Cold water added mid-cooking, or a pot that drops off the boil, gives a heavy, sodden pudding.
- SuetBeef suet from a butcher needs the papery membrane pulled away before chopping, as directed. Packaged shredded suet (about 4 oz by weight) can be used straight from the box; vegetable suet works but gives a slightly drier crumb.
- Quarter of a pint of milkAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, a generous half cup. Add it gradually — you want a stiff, sticky dough rather than a batter, and flour absorbency varies.
- "Beat the pudding well"A couple of minutes of vigorous mixing is enough to distribute the suet and aerate slightly. Overworking develops the gluten and toughens it.
- Mould and clothA well-buttered pudding basin is the modern equivalent; the quantities here make well over a pint of mixture, so choose a basin comfortably larger than the mixture to leave headroom. Cover with buttered parchment and foil, then tie the floured cloth over the top and use the corners as a lifting handle.
- Steaming instead of boilingThe same pudding steams successfully in a covered pan with the basin on a trivet in two inches of simmering water, and there is no risk of water creeping under the cloth. It will want the same four to four and a half hours.
- Pounded sugarSugar crushed fine in a mortar; caster or superfine sugar now. The recipe sifts it over the turned-out pudding just before it goes to table.
- Stoning the raisinsNineteenth-century raisins came with seeds. Modern seedless raisins need only be halved or left whole; six ounces is about a cup and a quarter.
- YieldServes four modestly. Custard, sweet white sauce or golden syrup are the usual accompaniments; the pudding itself is barely sweet.
Boiled suet puddings in a cloth are the backbone of English domestic cookery from the seventeenth century onward in in the same pot as everything else over the fire ortably. The pudding turns up under the "Baroness" title in Victorian household manuals with only minor variation; where the name came from is not documented. What is telling is Cassell's note of the probable cost, one shilling: the New Dictionary of Cookery was written for households counting pennies, and a pudding that fed four on a quarter-pound of suet and six ounces of flour earned its place on that ground alone. The long boil is not fussiness but necessity suthe suet must render slowly to lighten the crumb around it.