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Fruit Suet Pudding
Take equal quantities of flour and finely-prepared bread-crumbs, a quarter of a pound of each, put them into a bowl; add four ounces of shredded suet and two ounces of sugar; moisten with a cup of milk, and beat until smooth; then sprinkle and mix into the batter four ounces of well-washed currants, with a tea-spoonful of grated ginger and one of salt. Boil in a floured cloth, not in a mould. Time, two hours to boil. Probable cost, 7d. Sufficient for three or more persons.
A plain boiled suet pudding of the everyday Victorian sort, leaning on breadcrumbs to lighten the flour. Two things need attention before you start: the cloth, and the salt.
- Boil in a cloth, and prepare it properlyThe instruction not to use a mould is deliberate; a cloth-boiled pudding forms a skin, and cooks traditionally held that it came out lighter than a basin-steamed one. Scald a square of unbleached calico or a clean tea towel, wring it out, dust the inside generously with flour, heap the mixture in the centre, gather and tie with string leaving room for swelling, and lower into fast-boiling water that covers it completely. Top up with boiling water as it reduces so the pudding is never exposed.
- The salt is out of proportionA full teaspoon of salt in a pudding of this size will read as savoury against only two ounces of sugar. A half teaspoon or less is nearer modern taste, and if the suet is packaged and salted, less again.
- SuetFour ounces of shredded beef suet is roughly three-quarters to one cup of the packaged shredded kind, which is ready to use. Fresh butcher's suet must have membrane stripped off and be grated while very cold; frozen and coarsely grated works well. Vegetable suet substitutes directly but gives a slightly softer crumb.
- Quantities in modern termsA quarter pound each of flour and breadcrumbs is 4 oz / 115 g each, roughly 1 cup flour and 2 cups fresh crumbs. Sugar 2 oz / 55 g, currants 4 oz / 115 g. A "cup of milk" here is about 8 fl oz, but breadcrumbs vary enormously in how much they drink — add it gradually and stop at a thick dropping batter.
- "Finely-prepared bread-crumbs"Soft fresh crumbs from a day-old loaf, rubbed through the hands or a sieve, not the dry sandy crumbs sold for coating. Dried crumbs will absorb far more milk and give a heavy result.
- CurrantsDried currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Washing was necessary when they arrived gritty and stalky; modern packaged fruit needs only a rinse in hot water and a thorough drying before it goes into the batter.
- Timing and donenessTwo hours at a steady rolling boil is right. Untie the cloth as soon as it comes out, invert onto a warmed dish and peel the cloth away at once, or steam trapped underneath will make the surface sodden.
- Yield and serving"Three or more" is modest by Victorian standards; expect four to six portions. Serve hot with custard, a thin sweet white sauce, or simply cream and extra sugar. Leftovers slice and fry well in butter.
Boiled puddings in a floured cloth were a staple dessert of British households from the seventeenth century onward, and their survival owed much to the fact that they needed no oven — a pot over the fire would do, which suited kitchens with a single hearth and no baking capacity. The costing of sevenpence signals the market this recipe served: filling, cheap, built on suet from the butcher and stale bread that would otherwise be wasted. The half-and-half flour and breadcrumb mixture appears in a number of nineteenth-century pudding recipes, and the currants and ginger place it in the large family of "plain" fruit puddings that stood well below Christmas plum pudding in richness but shared its method. The insistence on a cloth over a mould reflects a commonly held view that basin-steamed puddings came out closer and heavier.