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Gingerbread Pudding
Grate six ounces of stale bread very finely. Mix it with three ounces of flour and six ounces of finely-shredded beef suet. Add a tea-spoonful of powdered ginger, a tea-spoonful of baking-powder, and two or three drops of almond or lemon flavouring. Make up into a smooth paste with half a pound of treacle, slightly warmed. Pour into a buttered mould, and boil for two hours. Probable cost, 7d. Sufficient for four persons.
A plain boiled suet pudding of the economical sort Cassell's costed to the penny. Nothing here is difficult, but two words in the method — "treacle" and "boil" — mean something different from what a modern reader will assume.
- "Boil" means boil the mould, not the pudding"Boil" refers to the water, not to a boiling batter: the mixture goes into a buttered basin or mould, covered tightly (traditionally a floured cloth, now pleated greaseproof paper and foil), which then sits in a pan of water. Victorian instructions to "boil" a mould generally meant standing it in fast-boiling water; a steady simmer with the water halfway or more up the sides is the usual modern equivalent. Keep it going for the full two hours and top up with boiling water as it evaporates; if the pan boils dry the pudding scorches and the basin can crack.
- TreacleBritish black treacle, the closest American equivalent being blackstrap or dark molasses. Half a pound is about 3/4 cup — weigh it rather than measure, since it clings to the cup. Golden syrup gives a much milder, paler pudding, which is a legitimate choice but not what the recipe intends.
- Beef suetShredded raw kidney fat, sold in packets in Britain and rendered near-invisible by long steaming. In the US, ask a butcher for fresh suet and grate it frozen, or use packet vegetarian suet. Butter is not a substitute here: it melts too early and the crumb turns heavy rather than open.
- Grated breadSix ounces of finely grated stale bread is somewhere around two and a half to three cups, depending how coarsely it grates. Use a close-crumbed loaf dried out a day or two, not packaged dried breadcrumbs, which are denser by volume and will make a leaden pudding.
- Almond flavouringTwo or three drops means exactly that — modern almond extract is potent and any more will bully the ginger. Lemon extract or a little grated zest is the safer of the two options offered.
- The ginger is restrainedA single teaspoon in a pudding for four is mild by current taste. Doubling it, or adding half a teaspoon of mixed spice, will give a more pronounced ginger flavour if you want one.
- Testing and turning outA skewer to the centre should come out clean and the pudding should feel springy. Let it stand five minutes before running a knife round the basin and inverting; it will slump if turned out straight off the heat.
- Yield and servingFour portions, as stated. Serve hot with custard, cream, or a thin lemon sauce — it is dense and sweet and wants something pourable.
Boiled suet puddings were long a mainstay of British domestic cookery: a cloth or basin, a pot already on the fire, and whatever fat and starch the house had to hand. This one belongs to the thrifty end of the tradition — stale bread rather than all flour, treacle rather than sugar — and Cassell's costing of sevenpence for four servings is the point of including it. Treacle, the dark residue of sugar refining, was cheap and widely available in late Victorian Britain, and its pairing with ginger in cakes and puddings is long established. The addition of baking powder is consistent with a later nineteenth-century date.