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Golden Pudding
Shred very finely six ounces of beef suet; mix with it half a pound of bread-crumbs, four table-spoonfuls of sugar, half a pound of orange marmalade, three eggs, and a pinch of salt. A little baking-powder will make the pudding lighter. Beat all the ingredients well together, and, if the pudding is not sufficiently moistened, add a little milk. Tie down in a well-floured cloth, and boil for three hours. Serve with wine sauce. Probable cost, 1s. 3d. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A plain boiled suet pudding sweetened almost entirely by marmalade. Nothing here is difficult, but the cloth and the three-hour boil both want translating.
- SuetSix ounces of shredded beef suet is about 170 g. Packet shredded suet (beef or vegetable) works directly; if you are starting from a lump of raw kidney suet, freeze it briefly and grate it, discarding any membrane.
- BreadcrumbsHalf a pound is 8 oz / 225 g. Fresh soft crumbs from a day-old loaf are the likely intention; dried packet crumbs absorb more liquid, so add extra milk, which the recipe itself allows for.
- MarmaladeAlso half a pound, 225 g, roughly two-thirds of a modern jar. This is the whole flavour of the pudding, so a bitter Seville marmalade is worth using over a sweet thin-cut.
- Baking powderThe book leaves the quantity open. A level teaspoon suits this volume of crumbs; much more will give a soapy taste.
- The clothA well-floured cloth means a scalded square of calico or an old tea towel, dipped in boiling water, wrung out, then dusted generously with flour so the surface sets into a skin. Tie it loosely enough to allow the pudding to swell by about a third. A greased 1.5-litre pudding basin with pleated parchment and foil is easier and gives a neater shape, and will need at least as long.
- The boilKeep the water at a steady simmer, fully covering the pudding, and top up from a boiling kettle. Water that stops boiling, or a pudding briefly left dry, produces a heavy wet band through the middle. Three hours is genuine, not padding: suet needs long slow heat to render and lighten the crumb.
- Wine sauceSauces of this name in the period are sweet sauces flavoured with sherry or madeira, sometimes custard-based, sometimes thickened with flour or cornflour. Warm brandy butter or plain pouring cream serves the same purpose.
- Yield and costSix to eight is accurate; this is a rich pudding and the portions are small. The 1s. 3d. is a late-Victorian retail estimate and has no modern equivalent worth calculating.
Boiled puddings in a floured cloth are the older English form, predating the china basin and the steamer. "Golden" here is often said to refer to the colour and flavour the marmalade gives, part of a family of Victorian suet puddings named for whatever sweetened them: jam roly-poly, treacle pudding, marmalade pudding. The recipe belongs to the era in which commercially made orange marmalade had become an ordinary storecupboard item in British households rather than a preserve each cook boiled herself. The proportion of suet to crumbs, roughly one to two, is a standard working ratio of the period.