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Ginger Pudding
Shred a quarter of a pound of fresh beef suet very finely. Add a pinch of salt, half a pound of flour, four ounces of moist sugar, and a dessert-spoonful of powdered ginger. Mix all these ingredients thoroughly, and put them dry into a well-buttered mould, which they will fill. Boil for three hours. Turn out, and serve with wine sauce. Probable cost, 5d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A plain boiled suet pudding of the most economical kind — six ingredients, no eggs, no milk as written. One line needs attention before you start.
- The missing liquidAs printed, the mixture goes into the mould dry, which will not produce a pudding: mixtures of this type need enough liquid to bind them into a stiff dough. Comparable puddings are mixed with milk or water — in the region of a quarter of a pint for this weight of flour — added last, to a dropping consistency. The omission is best treated as an error rather than a technique.
- No raising agentThere is no baking powder, soda or egg here, so the pudding relies entirely on steam and the suet melting to open the crumb. Expect a close, dense, slightly chewy texture rather than a light sponge; a teaspoon of baking powder is the usual modern addition if you want lift.
- SuetFresh beef suet from a butcher must be stripped of membrane and grated or chopped very fine, ideally chilled first. Packet shredded suet, beef or vegetarian, substitutes ounce for ounce and needs no preparation.
- Moist sugarNineteenth-century "moist" sugar is an unrefined soft brown sugar. Light or dark soft brown sugar is the closest thing on a supermarket shelf; four ounces is about half a cup, packed.
- Dessert-spoonfulAn imperial dessertspoon is two teaspoons, so roughly 3 to 4 g of ground ginger — assertive but not fierce. Ground ginger loses its heat in the jar, so use a recently opened tin.
- Filling and covering the mouldButter a basin or mould of about a pint and a half — a 1 pint basin will not take this quantity once the liquid is added — and fill it no more than three-quarters, whatever the original says about filling it; the pudding rises a little as it cooks. Cover with buttered greaseproof paper and foil, pleated to allow expansion, and tie under the rim.
- BoilingStand the basin on a trivet or folded cloth in a pan of simmering water reaching halfway up its sides, lid on, and top up with boiling water as it evaporates. Three hours is right for a pudding of this density; never let the pan boil dry.
- Wine sauce and yieldPeriod wine sauces for puddings are generally sweetened and lightly thickened and flavoured with sherry or Madeira; some versions are custard-based. Golden syrup, warm custard or cream all suit it. Four to five servings, as stated, is reasonable for a pudding of this density.
Boiled suet puddings were the backbone of British sweet cookery from the eighteenth century until the gas oven and cheap flour changed baking habits, and the recipe — apparently from Cassell's — prices this one at fivepence. Ground ginger was among the oldest and cheapest of the imported spices in a British kitchen, long domesticated by the time this dictionary appeared, and it turned a bland pudding of flour, fat and sugar into something worth eating without recourse to eggs, butter or dried fruit. The basin-and-cloth method predates reliable ovens: a pudding could be cooked over the same fire that boiled the dinner, which may be why so many recipes of this era seem to take a copper of water for granted rather than an oven at all. The absence of any liquid in the printed instructions could well be the kind of slip that crept easily into these very large compiled dictionaries, where thousands of short entries were set from working notes.