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Dumplings, Half-Hour
Shred very finely half a pound of beef suet, and prepare the same weight of bread-crumbs, with the addition of one table-spoonful of flour, three ounces of currants, two ounces of sugar, a little lemon-peel and grated nutmeg, moistened by three well-beaten eggs. Roll the dough into balls, tie them separately in small cloths, and boil very quickly. Serve with melted butter, sweetened, poured over them. Time, half an hour to boil. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for eight or ten dumplings.
A plain boiled suet pudding divided into individual dumplings, which is what gets the time down to half an hour. The dough is bound only by eggs, so the balls need real support while they cook.
- The hinge: tie loosely, boil hardEach ball needs its own floured cloth tied with a little slack, since the crumbs and suet swell. The recipe's "boil very quickly" means a full boil rather than a simmer, kept up for the whole thirty minutes; letting the pot fall back risks a sodden, poorly set dumpling.
- SuetBeef suet from a butcher, shredded fine as directed, or packaged shredded suet. Vegetable suet works. Do not substitute butter, which melts out rather than opening the crumb.
- BreadcrumbsHalf a pound is roughly 4 cups of soft crumbs from slightly stale bread, not dried commercial crumbs, which absorb far more liquid and will give you a dense ball.
- WeightsHalf a pound each of suet and crumbs; 3 oz currants is about 1/2 cup, 2 oz sugar about 1/4 cup. "A little lemon-peel" is left to the cook; the pared zest of one lemon, grated or chopped fine, is a reasonable reading.
- If the dough will not holdThree eggs should just bring it together. If it crumbles, a spoonful of milk is truer to the method than more flour.
- Cloths, or the modern alternativeScald the cloths, wring them out and flour the inside face before filling; this is what stops the dough sticking. Muslin or clean cotton squares tied with kitchen string do the job. Small heatproof basins covered with pleated foil, steamed rather than boiled, will take appreciably longer than the half hour given here; test before turning out.
- The sauceMelted butter sweetened to taste, poured over hot. A spoonful of the lemon zest or a splash of brandy in it is period-appropriate and keeps it from tasting merely greasy.
- Yield and costEight to ten dumplings, so six to eight servings as a pudding. The "1s." is one shilling, a late-Victorian household price with no modern equivalent.
Suet dumplings sit at the boiled-pudding end of British cookery, the tradition that produced everything from plain dough boiled with a stew to the full Christmas pudding, and their great advantage before reliable ovens was that they needed nothing but a pot of water and a cloth. Cassell's calls this one "Half-Hour" purely as a promise about timing: dividing the mixture into small balls cuts the cooking to thirty minutes. The pudding cloth, generally traced in English cookery writing to the seventeenth century, is what made that possible, freeing puddings from the animal gut they had previously been cooked in and letting a cook shape them at will. The currants, sugar, lemon peel and nutmeg here are the standard sweet-pudding flavouring of the period, when nutmeg was cheap enough to be grated over almost anything sweet.