Home › The Principles of Cookery › Fruit Pudding Paste
Fruit Pudding Paste
Chop six ounces of fresh suet as fine as can be, mix it with one pound of flour and a little salt. Knead it lightly, and make it into a smooth firm paste, with water. Roll out twice; the quicker this is done the lighter will be the paste. Time, a quarter of an hour to prepare. Probable cost, 5d. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
This is a suet crust — the wrapper for a boiled or steamed fruit pudding, not a dish in itself. It behaves nothing like shortcrust, and the one rule that matters is speed and cold.
- Work cold and fastWarm hands melt the suet into the flour and the crust steams up heavy instead of light. Use cold water, mix with a knife, and handle the dough as little as possible: the recipe itself asks only for light kneading and two rollings, and notes that "the quicker this is done the lighter will be the paste".
- "Fresh suet"Beef kidney suet from a butcher, skinned of membrane and chopped or grated fine. Packet shredded suet (beef or vegetarian) is the direct modern substitute and needs no chopping; frozen butter grated on the coarse side of a box grater also works, though the flavour is different.
- Fat ratioSix ounces of suet to a pound of flour is leaner than modern practice, which usually runs to half the weight of the flour — 8 oz suet to 1 lb flour. The original gives a firmer, chewier crust well suited to holding wet fruit without collapsing.
- Water is unmeasuredExpect roughly 250-300 ml (about 9-10 fl oz) of cold water for a pound of flour, added a little at a time until the dough just comes together. It should be firm enough to roll thinly, not slack.
- No raising agentThe recipe calls for none. Use self-raising flour, or add 2 teaspoons of baking powder to plain flour, for a lighter crust; leave it out for a denser, more traditional result.
- Lining a basinFor a 1.5-2 pint (1 litre) pudding basin, roll about two-thirds of the paste into a round, line the greased basin, fill with fruit and sugar, then cap with the remaining third, sealing the edges with water.
- Cooking time, which the recipe omitsThe quarter of an hour given is preparation only. A filled fruit pudding of this size needs 2 to 2.5 hours of steady steaming, covered with pleated baking paper and foil or a tied cloth; the water must never go off the boil or the crust turns sodden.
- Cost and yieldFivepence was the price of the paste alone in late-Victorian money. Six to seven servings is accurate for a pudding of this size.
Suet crust belongs to the older English tradition of the boiled pudding, in which a flour-and-fat paste served as both container and cooking vessel — first tied in a floured cloth, later pressed into an earthenware or china basin once those became cheap in the nineteenth century. It is a base preparation rather than a finished dish: the same paste, with the fat ratio and thickness varied, lines fruit puddings, and in savoury form becomes the crust of steak and kidney. Beef suet was the cheap, plentiful hard fat of the period, and its high melting point is what makes the crust set before the fat runs — the reason it survives long steaming where a butter pastry would not.